Medical Counseling by the Internet / 대한의료정보학회지

Recent progress in medical informatics enable to use various medical regardless of time or place, to make a diagnostic and therapeutic plan, with increasing need about health of general population. There are many homepages on the web, which provide medical common senses, hospital information. and medical counseling on the web. Virtual Hospital, which is comprehensive medical information system on the web, has medical counseling program with various health information such as self-diagnosis, first-aid treatment information, drug information, Q and A, and so on. The aim of this study is to examine the content and purpose of medical counseling on the web. The subjects consisted of 277 counsels which visited 'Medical Counseling' in the Virtual Hospital for December 1996 through May 1997. Many questioners wanted to consult about their symptoms, to know prevention and treatment strategies, and to know specific medical knowledge. The most common questions are as follows: general and unspecified, digestive, musculoskeletal, and skin problems. These findings suggest medical counseling may be used to supplement the lack of direct medical Interviews with doctors.

Development of the Health-Information System using a Multimedia Tool

BACKGROUND: As people have been interested in healt,h and as the microcomputers with multimedia steeing have been supplied more and more, there is increasing need of multimedia information about health. The CD-ROM, which is a representative multimedia tool, is capable of interacting between information-provider and users, offering audiovisual interface, and saving great deal of knowledge. METHODS: We developed the health-information system to provide ordinary people with hea1th information using multimedia tools. It, has 7 parts ; self-diagnosis, exploring human body, drug information, hospital information, first-aid treatment, Q and A, and medical common sense. We got image data such as figures, photos, X-rays, electrocardiograms and pathologic specimens with scanner and film scanner, also moving image(video) with video-capturing program. RESULTS & CONCLUSIONS: We hope the multimedia health-information system to become a useful methodology of patient education and to be used as an information source in medical information network in the near future.