Roundtable 3 - Introducttion

jwitte · Joined: 30 May 2005 Posts: 20

Few areas of the web have drawn more participants than online health resources. Topic areas include: 1) online health advice and diagnostic tools.
2) online support groups. 3) online referral and review of health care professionals. 4) other topics?

Shelia Cotten · Joined: 17 Jan 2006 Posts: 5

I think we should also discuss what factors lead some individuals to seek online health information and others to not. Are there factors besides traditional digital divide factors that come into play?

Also, are there particular ways that we might go about encouraging certain groups to start using the Internet, particularly for communication and health information seeking (perhaps, older adults)?

Shelia Cotten

Shelia Cotten · Joined: 17 Jan 2006 Posts: 5

For the second part of the online health discussion, I'd like to see us discuss the following topics:

1) How do we evaluate online health information?
2) Should we be encouraging people to use online health info-- If so, how should we do this?

mench · Joined: 28 Jul 2005 Posts: 3

To me, what is most interesting and important about online health information is the way its ubiquity influences contemporary professional-client relationships.
A colleague (Lei Jin) and I looked at the capacity of those who accessed medical information via the web to influence their physician's decisions. We looked at approximately 12,000 physicians, and the same number of patients, and found influence was contingent on the organizational setting of the physician and their perceptions of competition from other physicians. Large settings (i.e.lots of collegial support) and high concern for competition (i.e. fear patients might go elsewhere) led to more aquiesence.
Interestingly, the concern for competition was not associated with geographic concentration of physicians, suggesting that pats may bring in the findings, and signal in their interactions that they are consulting other sources of medical information...

Anyone doing this research? Would be very interesting to see what happens to internet-delivered health information post-download...

Cheers - Dan Menchik