The Cologne Internet-Manual of Pain Therapy - 18 month Online -Experiences and Evaluation

The objective of the project was the improvement of ambulant treatment for patients with chronic headache or cancer pain. Our approach to reach this goal was the distribution of accepted guidelines and standards by means of the internet in order to make this knowledge known among general practitioners and to give patients better access to this information. We have built an internet manual about the treatment of chronic headache and cancer pain. About 2800 readers accessed the manual during a period of 18 month. The manual has been completely downloaded 185 times. Physicians and patients very often used search engines to access the manual in their search for information about headache. The terms "migraine" and "tension type headache" were looked up the most. Our conclusion: It is worthwhile editing medical information for use on the internet and thus making it available to the public. Readers will find it.

The participants get background information about the efforts that are necessary to build and particularly to promote medical information on the internet.  There is a clearly observable connection between advertising effort and access rate. Detailed information about how users utilized manual-internal and   common internet search engines is provided.

Andreas Koop
IMSIE
University of Cologne
Joseph-Stelzmann-Str. 9
50931 Cologne
Phone: +49-221-4783460
Fax: +49-221-4783465
Email: Andreas.Koop@medizin.uni-koeln.de
Website: http://www.medizin.uni-koeln.de/stan/Schmerzmanual/

CO-AUTHORS:

Lukas Radbruch,
Christoph Hanssen,
Dino Carl Novak,
Frank Elsner,
Georg Loick,
Bernd Sonntag,
Ralph Mˆsges
University of Cologne