Andreas Junge MBA
IT & Healthcare Consultant, University of Bielefeld

2006 - Medical knowledge on the internet - patient-related information - major mistakes and recent problems
During the last ten years the internet was growing rapidly and still there is no stop. The number of registered internet-domains and webpages is increasing progressively and the upcoming economy in China, India or Russia will keep up this hype. Although the internet gold rush is over the onlinshops sell products all over the world to international customers with rising profit but without any working import or quality restrictions – especially for pharmaceutical products (to give one example: tamiflu products were offered by newsletters and onlineshops to millions of surfers).
The major problem of  a websurfer is the amount of information without any real help to select what is important. More and more the question how to find the wanted information or product becomes the central question of the web.
Recent studies show that three major players will control the market with their solutions of this problem during the next years: google, yahoo and ebay.
All in all even the auction-portal ebay is a kind of searchengine and onlineshop. Google is the number one searchengine in Europe while yahoo is still the leading searchengine in the USA. Any information – in our case medical information – which is not found with the help of these 3 giants does not exist for the public.
We can categorize between 5 different groups who search for medical information on the web: Scientists, people with economical goals, doctors, patient’s and relatives/friends of patient’s. Each group has different needs and questions but they use the same searchengines. Only if they know other knowledge sources – they may know the domain-name of a webportal which supports them with the wanted information.
The patient in the 21st century is better informed and usually tries to find out more about better therapies by using the internet. Doctors have to explain more and more what they do. scientists and companies can better prove the state of the art of their developments.
A big problem however is the amount of not validated or certified information – especially  in our case: medical information.
Healthcare companies have build up hundreds of webpages with public relation information or onlineshops offer vitamins to cure cancer… so it is more and more important for good medical information on the web to be found (in the major searchengines) and to be certified by independent institutions like HON or AFGIS (in Germany). However at the moment the ways to be proved are different and the success of the different quality marks is less.
So we asked in our study over 500 patient’s and relatives how they search for information and ask them if they trust the information they found.
A selection of medical webpages shows good and bad ways to publish medical information. Also several important rules how to develop better medical webpages and how to place them in searchengines will be explained. Further more an outlook on the technical development of the internet and the expected influence on medical webpages will be given.