Interactive Internet Web Sites: A Potentially Powerful Tool for Disease Management

The Internet represents a substantial advance in information exchange and presents the healthcare industry with a significant opportunity to fundamentally enhance the manner in which individuals manage their relative wellness. As the World Wide Web matures, usage patterns are becoming more precisely defined. These patterns can be examined and used to enhance accessibility and encourage user loyalty to a particular site. The internet, coupled with future technology advances, could enable healthcare providers to offer individually tailored disease management programmes, adapt to patient needs in real-time and deliver vast amounts of information with virtually no fulfilment costs. However, a planned and well co-ordinated approach is needed if the benefits of this new communication medium are to be fully realised. If this is achieved, Web-based disease management could be a cost-effective means of lowering patient health risk and an excellent asynchronous link between patient and provider.