WWW/Internet - Portal do Software Público Brasileiro

ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIScharacterization, the websites are clustered according to their purpose, offered services and means ofparticipation, which facilitates the comparability among the portals. Individual portals are then analyzed witha focus on the utilization of web 2.0 components and virtual communities. Then a set of design options thatallows describing the web portal’s business model according to a framework for virtual communitiesdescribed by Leimeister et al. (Leimeister and Krcmar, 2004). Thus, by reviewing contemporary healthrelatedwebsites, design options for virtual community business models in health care are identified.2. HEALTH CARE AND THE WEB 2.0In the last decade the internet started to be perceived as an important source of information and naturally italso became a source for patients seeking health information (Wilkins, 1999, Baker et al., 2003, Diaz et al.,2002). Since health information are vital, many publications assess the quality of health information on theinternet (Impicciatore et al., 1997, Eysenbach, 2002, Baker et al., 2003, Wilkins, 1999), assess thetrustworthiness of experts performing these quality assessments (Craigie et al., 2002) and evaluate its effecton transforming the traditional system of medical primary care (Murray et al., 2003, Cross, 2008).However, with the upcoming of web 2.0 technologies, the research focus has switched to the effects ofthe collaborative components of health care websites, which utilize the collective wisdom of the crowd. Forexample, Eysenberg discusses the influence of social networks as well as the willingness for patients tocollaborate regarding health related subjects online in his article about medicine 2.0 (Eysenbach, 2008).Because of an increasing number of people that use social networks regularly, an increasing number ofpeople use social networks to find answers to health-related problems. Nevertheless, there was no evidencefound that the influence of virtual communities and online peer to peer interaction did have a significantimpact on the patient’s convalesce (Eysenbach et al., 2004, Griffiths et al., 2009). Furthermore, ininterrelation to the common lack of willingness to pay for content that is available online, people are notwilling to pay for health related content either (Adler, 2006).3. METHODOLOGYThe methodology of health portal analysis is two-fold and has a qualitative as well as a quantitative approach.The first part consists of a quantitative search for German health-care-related portals, their classification andsubsequent clustering. In the second part, a set of business-oriented design options for community-centeredhealth care portals is identified through qualitatively analyzing particular portals more closely and state-ofthe-artliterature.3.1 Searching, Classifying and Clustering of Health PortalsThe search process for the German health-related web portals incorporates three procedures: a web searchusing Google, Bing and Yahoo with the German key words depicted in Table 1 in which the first 20 searchresults are considered excluding pages that do not target an audience seeking health-related information,products and services; interviews with healthcare researchers as well as domain experts; and examiningrelevant links on the retrieved websites that are identified with the first two procedures.Table 1. Translated German key terms used for the web searchAgeCareCare relativesCare supportCommunityDiseaseDoctorGeriatricsHealthHealth CareHealth insuranceHelping the elderlyLiving in old ageMedicineNursing homeNursing servicePatientPhysicianRelativesRetirement homeSelf-help groupSeniorsWellnessAfter the search process, the identified health-related web portals have to be classified in order tocompare their characteristics as well as cluster similar portals together. Consequently, the portals areclassified along two dimensions, which assess their accentuation of health care and user participation.50