Using information technologies to help doctors to provide high-quality consumer health information

Laypeople have a lot of health related questions, although they can search on the Internet, they don't know what consumer health information (CHI) they can trust. There are many mechanisms to help laypeople to select the reliable CHI, including ethical codes, guidelines, web awards, accreditation logos, and portal sites. But the number of questions is much more than good answers provided by healthcare professionals, especially doctors. To help doctors to provide high-quality consumer health information easily and efficiently, this study will use various Information Technologies and free online services, including mailing list (for mutual discussion and newsletter publication), article template of good CHI, webmail (for anti-spam), URL redirecting (for easy memorization and click statistics), creative commons, wiki (for tagging and quick organization), online form survey (for collecting questions), FAX2email and online audio recording (to speed doctors' productivity). Under the cooperation of doctors and use of various Information Technologies, we believe this study will attract a lot of doctors and readers, and generate certain amount of good CHI content in three months.