E-health surfers should proceed with caution

A study of online health data weighs the accuracy and usefulness of the millions of pages of information that patients could uncover via the Internet.

By Stephanie Stapleton, AMNews staff. June 11, 2001.

Washington -- An estimated 100 million Americans go online in search of health information, and 70% say what they find influences the decisions they make about their well-being.

Although the information their Web searches garner is generally accurate, it is also often incomplete and hard to understand, according to a study conducted by Rand and published in the May 23/30 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. The full report is available at Rand's Web site (http://www.rand.org/publications/documents/interneteval/) and also at the California HealthCare Foundation Web site (http://ehealth.chcf.org/).

"The Internet has moved from early childhood to awkward adolescence," said Sam Karp, the chief information officer of the California HealthCare Foundation, which commissioned the RAND report. "It has increased its scope and reach, but is still not mature enough to be reliable."

The study, which analyzed information found on both English- and Spanish-language Web sites regarding four common medical conditions -- breast cancer, depression, childhood asthma and obesity -- is the most comprehensive evaluation to date of the quality, accessibility and readability of the data found on millions of pages and thousands of Web sites in the e-health universe. [...]