Information superhighway or information traffic jam for healthcare consumers?

The phenomenal development and growth of the information superhighway over the past few years has brought with an ever-increasing number of sites associated with health care. At the same time, community access to the Internet and multimedia technology has allowed greater access to healthcare sites by consumers wishing to find healthcare information relevant to their needs. The Internet has greater potential for improving the healthcare knowledge of the community, especially in remote areas or in parts of the community that have limited access to community health infrastructure. However, most of the current development of healthcare sites has focused on the needs of healthcare professionals rather than consumers. Indeed, with the volume of information available over the Internet, it is easy to spend hours browsing through a maze of sites with information that often is fragmented, incomplete, or only accessible with a password. Once a relevant site is located, the information often is presented as vast amounts of text with possibly some graphics. It appears little consideration is given during the development of web sites to the actual presentation of the information. For the full potential of the information superhighway to be realized in relation to health care, more consideration should be given during the development stages of web sites to how the information is presented and how to make access more streamlined.