Resources Available for the Practitioner

Abstract

According to a recent survey, there are over 375 million people worldwide with Internet access along with an estimate of over 2 billion web pages, and growing at a rate of over 7 million per day. The rapid evolution of the Internet and the World Wide Web has provided health care practitioners with an overwhelming source of information. Although the Internet has enormous potential for practitioners, it also has probable drawbacks. The purpose of this presentation will be to provide an overview of Internet and computer based resources available to health care practitioners in the areas of information management, research, education, telemedicine, clinical practice and patient information. The emphasis will be to provide practitioners with an overview of present and future applications of Web technology in health care provision. There will be a discussion of resources available to practitioners and patients regarding the evaluation of web based information for content accuracy. Some recent studies have shown that although there are often times a number of web pages devoted to a topic, the content is often of a commercial nature and of dubious quality. The trend towards telemedicine (e-healthcare, tele-health) holds promise, however it may offer challenges in the area of medical ethics, regulation, and confidentiality. The use of the Internet by patients will offer exciting opportunities for enhanced communication between practitioner and patient, as well as challenges regarding accuracy of information that is available to patients. One of the areas that will be of particular interest to practitioners is in the computerization of medical records. Clinics now utilize this approach to submit individualized patient information into a centralized database that can be analyzed in aggregate to look at costs and outcomes for particular diagnoses. The potential for multi-site research using this approach may hold great promise for practitioners. Examples of this application will be discussed. For practitioners, the Internet offers the opportunity for continuing education, access to medical journals and information services as well as research. Practitioners may choose to be consumers of or vendors for medical information. One of the web based software packages (Blackboard) will be reviewed as to its potential for use by practitioners as well as how we utilize it at our University. An overview of a variety electronic databases and journals will be presented. Electronic versions of the references and the websites used for this presentation will be downloadable from our University website at: http://www.medicine.nodak.edu/pt.