Design and implementation of an Internet-based health information resource
Introduction
The Internet has created powerful new media of communication, which have begun to be used to promote health. The World Wide Web can disseminate cost-effective, high-quality patient education material on demand to virtually anyone, anywhere [1]. Electronic mail (e-mail) can be employed to provide patients and their family members with critical health information. These two technologies together offer new opportunities to promote health through education. This article describes the design and implementation of a platform for the delivery of health care information. The information is targeted to ‘health care consumers’ — patients, family members, and other laypersons in the community — as well as health professionals. An ultimate goal of the project is to make health care information most readily available and useable by tailoring it to individual users’ needs for information and style of information use.
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Mission statement and institutional stakeholders
The Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW) is a private institution of more than 750 faculty members located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The institution holds education, research, patient care, and community service as the four elements of its core mission. To address the health information needs of patients and the community at large, MCW defined a three-fold mission for providing Internet-based health information:
- 1.
To promote the health and well being of the community,
- 2.
To empower patients with
Design
The health information resource — called ‘MCW HealthLink’ — consists of a World Wide Web site and an e-mail newsletter. The two aspects of the system represent ‘pull’ and ‘push’ technologies. The web site allows readers to ‘pull’ information on demand; readers typically turn to the web to answer specific questions. The e-mail newsletter ‘pushes’ information directly to subscribers. MCW HealthLink’s web and e-mail components are fully integrated. Readers of the web site can subscribe to the
Information architecture
Specialized programs (‘scripts’) on the server are written in the perl programming language (version 5.0) and use the Common Gateway Interface (version 1.1). Such programs include a facility to search articles by title or keyword, to register newsletter subscribers, and to generate article pages and indexing documents. All information on the MCW HealthLink web site is stored in a database. Inquiries and update actions are made using the standard structured query language (sql). To assure
E-mail newsletter
As with the web site, the e-mail newsletter is designed for a lay readership and is written in journalistic style. The message is generated as ‘plain’ ASCII text, and does not include HTML formatting. The newsletter consists of a ‘masthead’ to indicate the newsletter’s name, a table of contents, several feature stories, a ‘What’s New’ section, and a footer with general information for subscribers. The newsletter’s feature stories typically consist of three or four short paragraphs, and can
Web site
Material for the web site is drawn from five primary sources; the distribution of articles from these sources is shown in Table 3, Table 4. ‘MCW Health News’ describes results of medical research or patient care activities. Initially, most of the articles in this category originated as news releases from the institution’s Office of Public Affairs.
‘Dear Dr. Becky’ and ‘The Doctor Is In’ are regular columns written by Rebekah Wang-Cheng, MD, and Russell G. Robertson, MD, respectively. Both are
E-mail newsletter
To complement the web site, the MCW HealthLink effort includes an electronic newsletter. The newsletter places an emphasis on content. Material is developed from brief summaries of existing articles and from new contributions from the institution’s public affairs office. The publication itself includes the entered articles and a list of the most recent additions to HealthLink’s article database. Each entry contains hyperlinks to the full-length feature.
The newsletter is published on the 1st and
Discussion
A number of very successful Internet-based collections of health information have been created, such as The Virtual Hospital [11] and NetWellness [12]. To maximize the usefulness of digital health libraries, developers should include a broad range of information on common and uncommon medical problems and ensure that the documents are catalogued in the major web search engines and web indices [13]. Although the Internet has potential to broaden the dissemination of health information,
Acknowledgements
Gary P. Barnas and Norberto de la Cruz contributed extensively to HealthLink’s development as co-editor and information resources specialist, respectively. The author extends sincere thanks to Mary B. Blackwelder, Cheryl Castelli, Richard A. Katschke, Steven Krogull, and Ondrej Zoltan, for their service on the Task Force on Clinical Information Resources, their contribution to the current system’s quality, and their enthusiastic support for this project. The effort was enriched by the efforts
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