Journal of medical Internet research
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Scientifically based clinical guidelines have become increasingly used to educate physicians and improve quality of care. While individual guidelines are potentially useful, repeated studies have shown that guidelines are ineffective in changing physician behavior. The Internet has evolved as a potentially useful tool for guideline education, dissemination, and implementation because of its open standards and its ability to provide concise, relevant clinical information at the location and time of need. ⋯ Previous work has shown that guidelines disseminated through traditional educational interventions have minimal impact on physician behavior. Although computerized DSS have been effective in altering physician behavior, many of these systems are not widely available. We have developed two clinical DSS's based on national guidelines and published them on the Internet. Both systems improved physician compliance with national guidelines when tested in clinical scenarios. By providing information that is coupled to relevant activity, we expect that these widely available DSS's will serve as effective educational tools to positively impact physician behavior.
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A growing number of prescription medicines such as Viagra are offered and sold directly to consumers on the Internet. Little is known about the structure and "quality" of these "virtual pharmacies" in terms of how responsibly "online-prescriptions" are actually issued. ⋯ Although a surprisingly high number of Internet pharmacies declined delivery, the public should be alerted to the risks involved with prescription drug prescribing and dispensing via the Internet.
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J. Med. Internet Res. · Jul 1999
Can examination of WWW usage statistics and other indirect quality indicators distinguish the relative quality of medical web sites?
The Internet offers a great amount of health related websites, but concern has been raised about their reliability. Several subjective evaluation criteria and websites rating systems have been proposed as a help for the Internet users to distinguish among web resources with different quality, but their efficacy has not been proven. ⋯ Some websites characteristics as the number of daily visits, their updating frequency and, overall, the number of websites linked to them, correlate with their evaluation by some of the largest rating systems on the Internet, what means that certain indexes obtained from the usage analysis of pediatric websites could be used as quality indicators. On the other hand, the citation analysis on the Web by the quantification of inbound links to medical websites could be an objective and feasible tool in rating great amounts of websites.