ABSTRACT
The Internet can be part of a technological bridge that can help both patients and physicians better manage health care processes and information (Rice & Katz, 2000) because more than half of Internet users in the United States seek health care information online. (While growth in such use is increasing worldwide, certainly there are wide disparities across and within nations and regions.) Although there has been good delineation of the types of activities for which health information seekers and physicians use the Internet, the interface of these two areas—how health information seekers and physicians bring information from the Internet to bear on one another—is less clear. Thus, this chapter looks at these relationships in greater detail, basing the analysis on a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-sponsored survey of the topic. Much of the data from this study has already been reported by Murray, Lo, Pollack, Donelan, Catania, et al. (2003a), although neither in this framework or using these analyses.
