BACKGROUND: Practice-based Internet communication allows patients to obtain health information, ask questions, and submit requests through a personalized Web site. While such online tools also bring great promise for educating patients with the goal of fostering behavior change, it is important to examine how individuals currently using such services differ from those who do not. OBJECTIVE: The study used administrative information to characterize a population of patients communicating with...

BACKGROUND: Interest in monitoring the quality of health care in the United States has increased in recent years. However, the policy objectives associated with collecting this information are constrained by the limited availability of timely and relevant data at a reasonable cost. Online data-collection technologies hold the promise of gathering data directly and inexpensively from large, representative samples of patients and consumers. These new information technologies also permit...

BACKGROUND: A cancer diagnosis is highly distressing. Yet, to make informed treatment choices patients have to learn complicated disease and treatment information that is often fraught with medical and statistical terminology. Thus, patients need accurate and easy-to-understand information. OBJECTIVE: To introduce the development and preliminary evaluation through focus groups of a novel highly-interactive multimedia-education software program for patients diagnosed with localized prostate...

BACKGROUND: Attempts in current health care practice to make health care more accessible, effective, and efficient through the use of information technology could include implementation of computer-based dietary menu generation. While several of such systems already exist, their focus is mainly to assist healthy individuals calculate their calorie intake and to help monitor the selection of menus based upon a prespecified calorie value. Although these prove to be helpful in some ways, they...

BACKGROUND: As the number of youths using the Internet regularly increase, so too does the number of youths potentially vulnerable to negative experiences online. Clinicians, policy makers, and parents need to better understand the Internet and factors related to positive and negative experiences online. OBJECTIVE: Primarily to investigate the association between youth-reported depressive symptomatology and unwanted Internet sexual solicitation and secondarily to identify sex differences in...

BACKGROUND: The Internet has tremendous appeal for conducting randomized clinical trials and may be especially applicable to trials requiring frequent participant contact. Trials of cold sore remedies, for example, often require daily clinic visits during outbreaks, imposing substantial burden on participants. An Internet-based randomized clinical trial design may reduce this burden, permitting frequent symptom reports with considerably less effort. OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the feasibility of...

BACKGROUND: Pre-natal and post-natal periods are times when many women actively seek health information from multiple sources, including the Internet. However, little is known about how pregnant women and mothers of young children seek and process online pediatric health information. OBJECTIVE: To explore why and where mothers of young children look for online health information and how they determine if the information they receive is trustworthy. METHODS: Focus groups were conducted in a...

BACKGROUND: The recent public health risks arising from bioterrorist threats and outbreaks of infectious diseases like SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) highlight the challenges of effectively communicating accurate health information to an alarmed public. OBJECTIVE: To evaluate use of the Internet in accessing information related to the anthrax scare in the United States in late 2001, and to strategize about the most effective use of this technology as a communication vehicle during...

BACKGROUND: There are multiple ways in which community pharmacies can present themselves on the Internet, e.g., as a platform for drug information or as an advertising platform for their services. OBJECTIVE: To estimate the number of Swiss community pharmacies on the Internet over the period of 32 months (2000-2003), to describe their current e-commerce services, and to explore the experiences and plans these pharmacies have with regard to their Internet presence. METHODS: A longitudinal...

BACKGROUND: To use technology effectively for the advancement of patient care, pharmacists must possess a variety of computer skills. We recently introduced a novel applied informatics program in this Canadian hospital clinical service unit to enhance the informatics skills of our members. OBJECTIVE: This study was conducted to gain a better understanding of the baseline computer skills and needs of our hospital pharmacists immediately prior to the implementation of an applied informatics...

BACKGROUND: As more and more information technology (IT) resources become available both for support of campus- based medical education and for Web-based learning, it becomes increasingly interesting to map the information technology resources available to medical students and the attitudes students have towards their use. OBJECTIVE: To determine how extensively and effectively information handling skills are being taught in the medical curriculum, the study investigated Internet and...