"Information prescriptions" work, and would work better with OA. Donna M. D'Alessandro and three co-authors, A Randomized Controlled Trial of an Information Prescription for Pediatric Patient Education on the Internet,
Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, 158 (2004) pp.
857-862. Excerpt: "We conducted a randomized controlled trial of
parents visiting an academic general pediatric practice....The
intervention group was offered computer training and received the IP
[information prescription] and training summary handout....Parents of
children in pediatric practices commonly use the Internet for general
and children's health information. In this study, IPs were associated
with specific parental attitude and behavior changes resulting in
increased Internet utilization for general and child health information
and for specific high-quality information resources. Pediatricians can
implement IPs in their office."
Here's how John O'Neil summarizes the result in today's New York
Times: "A new kind of prescription can be filled online, but it does
not involve using the Internet to order drugs. Physicians call it an
information prescription, and a study released yesterday found it to be
effective in guiding parents toward reliable Web sites....[A] large
body of research had [already] found that well-informed patients tended
to do better. The Internet has made medical information more accessible
than ever. But the health care field has struggled over the last decade
to find ways to tap that potential while helping patients avoid the
many sources of misinformation that have become more available as well.
In the new study, about half of 197 parents of patients at the
pediatric clinic of the University of Iowa were randomly chosen to
receive a short session of Internet training and an information
prescription. The prescription was on a form that listed three Internet
sites the study described as authoritative and that left room for the
pediatrician to add others....Over the next few weeks, the parents who
received the information prescriptions used the Internet significantly
more than those who had not. And their searches appeared to be guided
in large measure by their doctors' recommendations: two-thirds of the
sites they reported using had been included in the lists." See John
O'Neil, Information's Healing Power, New York Times, September 7, 2004 (free registration required).
(PS: Imagine how much more useful this practice could be if the NIH adopts its proposed open-access plan.
Open access would remove the access barriers to a very large and
continuously growing body of of peer-reviewed medical literature that
doctors could "prescribe" to their patients --and that patients could
then access from home without payments, passwords, or permission.) [Open Access News]
6:26:45 PM  .
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