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Health Care Information on the Web: Model and Menace
Laurie Gelb
Department of Biomathematics
University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, USA
laurie@biomath.mdacc.tmc.edu
Transcending traditional product lines of foods, drugs, devices, and providers, today’s medical
organizations “market” intangibles such as risk-assessment/reduction, self-care and self-triage,
plan/network enrollment, and, more generally, appropriate utilization of the professional resources they
provide. Thus, health care offers its constituents specific benefits for purchasing and utilizing their
offerings in certain ways.
Ironically, an increasingly customer-centered industry must now control customer expectations
and manage demand as never before. Thus, the importance of communicating specific differences
between appropriate and inappropriate care-seeking and lifestyle behaviors has never been greater.
Behavioral changes are more likely to derive from personal experience than through abstract reasoning.
The Web permits the integration of multimedia learning tools, updated information, a range of reputable
sources and easy access to the histories of others. However, it often lacks a means through which to
integrate an individual’s characteristics and experience into Web-based health-related informationseeking.
For example, few sites offer any of the following: detailed, interactive algorithms for evaluating
providers and plans, comprehensive provider directories, simplified explanations of plan certificates,
explanations for common diagnostic tests and procedures, differential diagnoses, or even reference values.
Moreover, most summaries of diseases are simply text blocks, with few hypertext or other links to relevant
literature, topics or providers. The integration of forms and search engines is also fairly minimal, given
such basic uses as: plan and address changes, personalized benefits inquiries, interactive maps,
questionnaires, pilot tests, complaints, compliments, etc.
Professionals in many fields, not only health care, are frequently chastised for their failure to offer
customers a clearly-defined role in specifying the product. The plumber says simply, “you need a new
drain pipe.” The physician states, “you need to start a beta blocker,” not necessarily addressing the
consequences of each alternative.
Basic concerns, such as clarifying terse statements about diagnosis or treatment, or why certain
questions are asked during an examination, remain difficult to address under the hierarchial, parochial
structure of most Web-based health information. Many sites restate information that can be found
elsewhere, rather than linking to other sites as appropriate and building a site based on their individual
strengths. Content providers benefit when the highest quality, most creatively-presented Web-based
information on every conceivable health topic is available readily to their patients and other constituents.
Three overlapping viewpoints characterize Web-based health care information:
Model: The Web facilitates information flow, increases sophistication about health, and fosters
realistic expectations and the management thereof. Over time, the Web and other media will successfully
enhance self-responsibility, lifestyle changes, and health maintenance as opposed to symptom-focused,
quick-fix care.
Marketing Tool: The Web should be utilized as any other marketing tool. Thus, content providers
on the Web should focus on specific messages, complement other marketing tactics, and mediate
unfavorable messages whenever possible. To do otherwise cedes the Web to a random assortment of
uncontrolled data.
Menace: The Web is more a menace to appropriate care-seeking than a medium for education or
marketing. It allows low-quality messages to be accessed repeatedly, thus continually lowering the
aggregate quality of health care information available. “Quackery” assumes an artificial importance since
Web users cannot differentiate sources of information and their credentials as easily as with other media.
Thus, providers and other responsible parties should focus their efforts on traditional media in an attempt
to counter and perhaps neutralize the Web's impact.
Certain characteristics of the Internet strongly influence the usage of health care information,
such as: