Project outline and design


What can family physicians use the internet for as part of their clinical practice?

Useful internet resources:

Resources will be evaluated by searching for family practice topics in GME handout, which include:

Abdominal pain, adult health maintenance, anxiety or depression, arm or shoulder pain, asthma, back or neck pain, bronchitis or pneumonia, cellulitis or skin infection, chest pain, dermatitis or eczema, diabetes mellitus, headaches, hypertension, leg/hip/foot pain, otitis media, prenatial care, sore throat, upper respiratory infection, urinary tract infection, well child care.

These resources are part of the core learning objectives for family physicians set up by the AAFP.

Internet resources will be graded on 5 criteria:

The reviewer(s) will grade the site on a 1 to 5 scale, 5 being the best, 1 being the worst.


Further Investigation of the requirements of the project and time constraints prompted a modification of the above objective (grading sites). The web site designer felt that the evaluation of the web site (in terms of content and performance) were better performed by the professional teams at commercial web sites, such as healthatoz.com, which maintain a staff of physicians and editors on salary for that express purpose. The page designer used the reviews on healthatoz.com as a screening tool, and only chose those sites that were rated highly (3 or better stars) by the healthatoz.com staff. The relevant sites were then personally investigated and informally evaluated for quickly accessible and accurate clinical information, and were included if the appropriate information was present.

Examples:


A brief list of sites (20) will be identified and evaluated for their clinical usefulness using the above scale, and will be given a rating based on a numerical score. Some basic information will also be included, such as applicable fees or registration requirements, time in seconds to access a page within a site bearing pertinent information regarding the selected topics.

Finally, a web page will be established with a series of links to the best 20 sites bearing pertinent information on the selected family practice topics.

Again, this objective was modified, as the number of useful sites found by initial investigation proved to be much larger. The final site has as of 21 SEPT 1998 a total of 124 links, all tested for function as of that date.


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