Doctors and the Web: Help your patients surf the Net safely
They want access to online health information, but they can't always distinguish between well-established clinical protocols and quackery.
Cover Story
Doctors and the Web
Help your patients surf the Net safely
They want access to online health information, but they can't always distinguish between well-established clinical protocols and quackery.
By Deborah A. Grandinetti
Senior Associate Editor
The Internet promises to touch every aspect of a physician's professional life, from patient relations to access to clinical studies, from billing to patient records, from marketing to e-mail.
To help you make sense of what may be the most profound force in medical practice today, we're kicking off a new series with this article on helping patients navigate the Internet. Future installments, which will run in our first issue of every month, will look at such topics as online patient charts; Web-based electronic medical records; services that electronically connect doctors with health plans, hospitals, and other providers; and online supply purchasing.
No doubt you've had patients query you about health information they've gotten off the Internet. Maybe you welcome the exchange, figuring that an informed patient will take better care of herself and stay healthier. But no matter what your attitude, you need to accept these conversations as part of the job. If there's one thing you can count on, it's having to deal with more and more Internet-informed patients.
A Harris Poll found that 70 million adults used the World Wide Web to find health information between June 1998 and June 1999. And the numbers grow each month. So if you don't know how to deal with these exchanges gracefully, you risk turning off a lot of patients.
That's especially true if you practice in an area like Silicon Valley, Austin, TX, or Manhattan's Silicon Alley, where you'll have to work hard to keep up with your patients. But even if your patients aren't computer literate, you can't afford to ignore the Internet. Eighty-year-old Mrs. Smith may not be surfing the Web, but chances are her 50-year-old daughter or 25-year-old granddaughter is doing it for her, says physician and online health specialist Tom Ferguson of Austin, TX. Ferguson is author of Health Online: How to Find Health Information, Support Groups, and Self-Help Communities in Cyberspace (Addison-Wesley, 1996). He's also a professor of health informatics at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston, and publisher of The Ferguson Report, a free online newsletter (