Measuring the readership of a health-related Website.

A national database of telemedicine was set up with the sponsorship of the British government to provide a source of information to anyone researching the field or proposing a telemedicine project. To monitor the readership of the database we subscribed to a free Internet service called Extreme Tracking. Since the Website was launched there have been over 9000 visits from over 5000 different Internet addresses. The peak was in the week after launch, when it had 400 visitors in four days. Subsequently, the number of visits tailed off slightly, but nine months later the database was still attracting about 800 visits per month. The majority of visits were via links from other Websites. Of the 288 different Websites identified, the one operated by the UK National Health Service (NHS) Information Authority generated the most visits, suggesting that many readers were from within the NHS. The second most common form of referral was from search engines. Most visits were on weekdays and during normal UK working hours. Taken together with the fact that the Internet domain that generated most visits was the '.uk' one, we concluded that most readers were based in the UK and accessed the site as part of their jobs rather than as a spare-time activity. This is encouraging for the take-up of telemedicine in the UK.