Making the most of the Net to educate your patients
By Chris Dwyer
Patient brochures can help explain complex patient problems, but finding top-notch information for patients—and making sure it is timely—can be a real hassle. To address these problems, a number of organizations are offering authoritative, up-to-date educational materials on the Internet. And, perhaps best of all, many of the materials are free.
The home page of The Epilepsy Foundation (www.efa.org), for example, provides information about epileptic therapies and living with epilepsy, as well as links to community and medical resources. The site explains how to administer first aid for brief seizures and lists the causes and treatment of status epilepticus.
In addition, large, integrated health care delivery systems have developed patient education sites with synoptic information about hundreds of health conditions. UCSD Healthcare HealthGuide (health.ucsd.edu/guide/), which is part of the site run by the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), contains one-page synopses on more than 300 health topics. Daniel R. Masys, FACP, director of biomedical informatics at UCSD, said that his institution's site answers about 120,000 page requests per month.
Some internists have decided to take a do-it-yourself approach. Michael H. Zaroukian, FACP, chief of the division of general internal medicine at Michigan State University, sends patients to his own Web site, where they can download a handout on weight loss. Dr. Zaroukian said that he finds the Internet so helpful as a source of information that he often gives patients pointers on surfing the Internet. "I sit down with patients in my clinic," he said, "to show them how to locate drug information, identify support groups and find medical resources on the Web to answer specific questions."
Other Web sites provide patients with more than just literature. Walter Reed Army Medical Center nephrologist Maj. Kevin C. Abbott, FACP, frequently shows patients how to use the interactive 1/serum creatinine calculator located on his hospital's site (www.wramc.amedd.army.mil/departments/medicine/nephro/nephrology/). The tool is so useful, Dr. Abbott explained, because it shows patients "how close to dialysis they really are."
NetWellness (www.netwellness.org) is another site that offers patients more than just facts and figures about their illnesses. The site, which is a joint venture of the University of Cincinnati, Case Western Reserve University and Ohio State University, offers the latest medical research. The site's "Ask an Expert" area features physicians, nurses and pharmacists who answer visitors' health questions.
Finally, if you're concerned about the information your patients are going to find in cyberspace, help is available on the Web. The California Medical Association's site (www.cmanet.org/Public_Interest/Library_of_Links/fdacon.html) contains an article, "How to Evaluate Medical Information Found on the Internet," that includes suggestions on how to assess medical information on the Internet.
Chris Dwyer is Medical Informatics Program Associate in ACP-ASIM's Education Division. He can be reached at medinfo@acponline.org.
Related Web sites
Internists who regularly use the Web have said that the following sites offer top-notch information for patients.
The first two sites provide indices of biomedical Internet resources. They include annotations and rankings of consumer-oriented resources. The third is a government-sponsored site that serves as a gateway to consumer health and information resources provided by government agencies and other organizations.
- HealthAtoZ Consumer Health and Information
www.healthatoz.com/categories/CH.htm - Medical Matrix Patient Education
www.medmatrix.org/SPages/Patient_Education.asp - Healthfinder
www.healthfinder.gov
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