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The High-Tech House Call

Even as health-care reform threatens to limit consumer options, savvy patients are turning to the Internet for comfort--and medical information.

  

We may not exactly have a harmonic online medical convergence yet, but it's coming as increased public access to the Internet collides with the way patients receive health-care information. By the end of this year, 27 million people--nearly half of all Internet users--will have searched the Net for medical information, according to Find/SVP Emerging Technologies Research Group in New York City.

Tom Ferguson, M.D., author of Health Online: How to Find Health Information, Support Groups and Self-Help Communities in Cyberspace (Addison-Wesley Publishing), and editor of The Ferguson Report, believes that the educational resources and online communities the Internet provides are transforming the way patients--and their doctors--approach health care. "For those who have the technology, there's a whole new range of choices available," he says. "Instead of everybody being a passive patient and all doctors treating everyone the same, I think we now have three types of patients: the traditional passive patient, the concerned consumer who takes somewhat more responsibility, and the group I call 'health-active' or 'self-helpers' who want to take a very high degree of responsibility, almost to the point of pretty much running the show."

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