Use of the World Wide Web by family practitioners

We introduced the World Wide Web to family practitioners through seminars conducted at 13 family practice clinics in northern Minnesota. The seminars included the history and applications of the Web. We also conducted searches on the Web with the family practitioners and graded the searches for physician usefulness. The physicians then evaluated the technology through a subjective survey. Thirty-three searches were attempted with 55% resulting in useful information. The average grade increased 22% over the study period, while the search time decreased 7% to an average of 8.5 minutes per search. The majority of family practitioners surveyed (65%) said they would use the Web in their practice, primarily for patient education, CME, and information retrieval. The major disadvantage they cited was the length of time to retrieve information. Our goal was to introduce the professional community to an available technology that may enhance the quality of medical practice and to determine the technology's present and future applications. These preliminary results indicate that health care professionals recognize the practical usefulness of the Web.