Is the Internet a Useful Tool to Educate Cardiac Surgery Patients?

(#2001-4444 ... August 7, 2001)

Giuseppe D'Ancona, MD, ¹ Monica Murero, PhD, ² Jacob Bergsland, MD,³ Hratch Karamanoukian, MD³

¹The Department of Cardiac Surgery of the Hospital Laval, Ste Foy, Quebec, Canada

²The International Institute of Infonomics, University of Maastricht, Maastricht, Netherlands

³The Center for Less Invasive and Robotic Heart Surgery, Kaleida Health, Buffalo, NY, USA

Introduction:

Adequate medical information is a crucial means to prepare, sensitize, and educate patients before and after surgical intervention. Although the benefits of proper and adequate patient education are enormous, a large number of patients remain unaware of how and where to retrieve medical information suited to their needs. The recent introduction and popularization of the World Wide Web (WWW) has revolutionized, in a short time, the way information is retrieved and communicated. The Internet has given, to a large number of users online, the possibility to access and gain immediate information of an encyclopedic breadth. The WWW is a potential tool that can help patients retrieve medical information and increase knowledge about innovative procedures. The adequacy and efficacy of Internet-mediated medical information has been poorly investigated. The population of "health care seekers" that access and search medical Websites on a daily basis includes patients that have already undergone or will undergo medical or surgical treatment, and people that do not have personal health related problems. It is important to discriminate between simple browsers and actual medical patients. In the fifield of cardiac surgery, for example, only a few authors have dedicated their attention to define the pros and cons of WWW-mediated patient education [Scherrer-Bannerman 2000].

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