Methods
This study was reviewed by the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center (CCHMC) Institutional Review Board and deemed to be non-human subjects IRB 2021-0468.
CCHMC is a large, urban pediatric medical center; the transplant service performs approximately 100-120 transplants annually. In 2016, the division of Bone Marrow Transplant and Immune Deficiency at CCHMC partnered with the internal marketing department and created educational videos for patients and caregivers undergoing HSCT. Families are informed of the YouTube-hosted videos through the Bone Marrow Transplant Education page on the main hospital website, printed education materials, and one-on-one communications with the care manager.
Fifteen videos were selected for analysis, representing the five transplant topics, each delivered as separate videos in the three most common patient languages spoken at CCHMC: English, Spanish, and Arabic (Table 1). These educational videos were selected due to their “unlisted” status on YouTube, meaning that the videos can only be viewed if someone had a direct link and are not available through YouTube searches or recommendations, supporting a better comparison between view counts and patients transplanted.
YouTube offers aggregated video performance statistics for videos. The available data include the aggregated overall view count and overall average watch percentage for each video over a specified time range. These data were obtained for each of the videos on the YouTube Analytics site9. It is important to note that individualized view data are not provided.
We compared each video’s views to the number of patients going through the transplant process during each video’s lifetime (from the video upload date to January 2022). We identified relevant patients from the CCHMC HSCT database using the infusion date of the first transplant. Patients who underwent their first transplant concurrent to or after each video’s release date were selected. The patient’s language was extracted from the electronic health record (EHR).
Mean views per patient was calculated using the total video views of each topic and language divided by the number of patients undergoing the first transplant during the video’s release. Overall topic and languages watch percentages were calculated using weighted means with topic and language performance weighted by view count. Pearson correlation coefficient was computed to explore the relationship between video length and average watch percentage.