The analysis of the present status of the medical internet sites in Korea

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: After the World-Wide-Web(www) appeared, history has abruptly fallen in the new era of the Internet. In Korea, after the first medical internet site appeared, there was a major development in the WWW. But the quality and quantity of the web-page remains in infancy. Therefore, through the analysis of the Korean medical internet sites on present status, directions for development of Korean medical internet sites can be made. METHODS: From April 1st, 1999 to June 30th, 1999 in the Korean web sites, we visited 1044 sites. They included "Medmark Korea" representing medical search engine, "Eulji medical library" in the Eulji Medical College Hospital, and the medical sites of the "Yahoo Korea", "naver.com", and "simmani.com". Through this internet search, the information about locations, first publication year, classification by characteristics of homepage, speciality, web service form was obtained. Among these sites, acquireing from insufficient source further, questions were sent to the webmasters of 143 websites by e-mail. The questions included 7 items on the characteristic of webmasters, 8 items on the general characteristics of internet sites, 8 items on the contents, and their own comments. RESULTS: The occupation of webmasters was as follows: were physicians 94.4%, were male. According to age distribution, those in their thirties was 48.2%, and forties, 33.3%. Amone the 521 websites confirmed, there were 44 sites in 199 151 in 1996, 237 in 1997, and 79 in 1999. According to the distribution of location, metropolitan areas including Seoul, Inchon, Kyonggi occupied 68.9% among total. The main portion of the intentional visitors was ordinary people comprising 39.2%, members 9.8%, and physicians 7.7%. Concerning the purposes of publication, 38.7% of websites intended for health education to citizens, 31.0% for publicity of hospital or organizations, and 15.5% for exchange of information between members. For the most significant contents, 26.6% focused on the common-sense health issues, 35.7% on exchange of special medical information, 8.4% on education data for medical students, and 13.3% on publicity of hospitals. For the update interval, 22.0% renewed their sites within 1 week, 22.7% in 1 month, 23.4% in 3 months, and 20.6% in 6 months. For the effectiveness of homepage, the rate of `good' and `very good' response was 52.8%. CONCLUSION: Our investigation, showed that medical internet sites are lead by those in their thirties and forties. Web sites was concentrated to metropolitan areas where informational infrastructure was well developed. It is emphasized that efforts to informationalization by are needed by, governmental medical database systems should be established, and that the guidelines which enables validity of medical information should be set forth.