In this information technology age, an increasing number of patients and their parents utilize the internet to obtain medical information. There is an urgent need for general pediatricians as well as all primary care physicians to offer patient counseling on how to find useful information online for their daily healthcare needs. At the present time there is no requirement or standard in medical training on the subject of online patient education. Hands-on experience for medical trainees in online patient education is largely neglected.

For the past three years, we have been building a website www.funandeducation.org to serve as a clearing house for reliable medical information and a tool for medical training in the clinic. MSIIIs participating in this project had a unique opportunity to achieve the following objectives during their ambulatory pediatric rotation:

- To learn how to search online clinical literature and patient education resources effectively.

- To learn how to identify and package online healthcare topics frequently asked by patients and parents.

- To counsel patients and parents how to use web for their healthcare needs.

A total of 31 MSIIIs who have rotated through the pediatric clinic since September, 2006 participated in the online patient education training during their three-week pediatric ambulatory rotation. MSIIIs and their mentor went through a step-by-step demonstration and discussion of how to search online clinical literature and patient education resources by using online training pages, practicing online searching for the topics frequently discussed in daily practice, selecting specific topics to build hosting web-pages, making a outline, finding online patient education resources, selecting color, and designing web-pages. A mini-survey on “What are top five online websites you have used or plan to use for patient education in primary practice?” was given at the beginning and the end of the rotation.

RESULTSBACKGROUND

PARTICIPANTS

The website http://www.funandeducation.org/ (see below) has been serving as a resource for primary practice, medical education, patient education as well as serving as a referral center. It has been listed on the top page when searching “fun and education” in Google and Yahoo for the last two years. Medical students are actively involved in the web development, thereby serving patients and their parents in primary practice and the community.Among the 31 medical students, 12 received pre-/post-training surveys. These 12 medical students all significantly changed their preferred patient education websites in the post-training survey, moving from academic websites to patient education websites.

Pre-training survery Post-training survery

www.uptodate.com (7)

Pubmed.gov (5)

www.ebscohost.com/dynamed (4)

www.google.com (3)

medlineplus.gov (3)

pedsinreview.aappublications.org (3)

cdc.gov (2)

emedicine.medscape.com (2)

medicinenet.com (2)

wikipedia (2)

kidshealth.org (10)

medlineplus.gov (9) cdc.gov (7)

funandeducation.org (5)

mayoclinic.com (5)

uchicagokidshospital.org (4)

AAFP-Familydoctor.org (3) patiented.aap.org (3)

wikipedia (2)

webmd.com (1)

( ) number of students voted out of total of 12 participants.

The flexibility and adaptability of web-based patient education information allows the clinician to tailor the resources to situations where the medical information is constantly evolving and can be especially confusing for the patient. See our example with “Seasonal Flu and H1N1 Flu” on left.

CONCLUSIONThis experience allows MSIIIs:- To view interaction with the medical

establishment from the patient’sperspective

- To learn how to search online clinicalliterature and patient educationresources effectively

- To make online search results easilydigestible for patients and parents.