Pediatric Informatics: Computer Applications in Child Health (Health ...

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13.3.5 Information for Families
Reliability, accessibility and usability of health information for families are three
areas of concern in recommending resources. In addition, issues of language, literacy
and culture must be considered in content and format of such resources. There
is a growing body of literature on these aspects of patient-provider communication,
especially as US demographics change over time. As such, resources are also
changing to meet these evolving patient needs. Two examples are:
MedlinePlus (http://www.medlineplus.gov, National Library of Medicine)
provides current and readable health information in English and Spanish on
diseases, therapies and drug information in Web pages and patient information
sheets. When possible, linkages to local resources are provided.
Patient Education Online (http://patiented.aap.org/index.aspx, American
Academy of Pediatrics) is a subscription service for pediatricians that provides
current English or Spanish patient information sheets produced by the AAP
for download, that may be printed in the office for families, and may also be
used as a practice marketing tool. A big advantage of the online format is paper
reduction.
HealthVault Search (http://www.healthvault.com, Microsoft Corporation) is a
consumer-targeted search engine to a number of vetted sources of health information
as part of a personal health information management system where users
may create accounts for storing and using health information.
13.4 Conclusion
The increasing availability of electronic medical information for patient care,
education and research provide great opportunities for practicing pediatricians to
be more efficient, productive and better communicators and learners. Integration
of general medical knowledge resources with patient-specific applications (such as
electronic health records) will continue to evolve, but knowing what resources will
be useful to practitioners in specific clinical environments is essential to get the best
return on investment in electronic resources.
13.5 Case Study: Using the World Wide Web
and Google for Health
The Google World Wide Web search engine (See “Clinical Constellations” earlier
in this chapter) uses a mathematical algorithm called “PageRank” 11 as a measure
of authority of a given Webpage in response to an entered query. While most clinicians
are not likely to depend solely on Google for diagnosing patients, they may