Web site offers 'Health' care

Do you have trouble remembering to schedule doctor's appointments? If so, the University's Health System had you in mind when they designed their World Wide Web site. Fire up your browser and head to http://www.med.upenn.edu, click a button and a representative from the University's primary care network will call to set up an appointment -- free of charge. In an effort to draw attention to the University's medical facilities, the Health System and Medical School Web site offers convenient services for potential patients and reference materials to professionals. "As an academic institution, we need to wind up having a presence [on the Internet] the same as any other academic institution," Medical School Computing and Education Technology Director Albert Shar said. "The growth of the Internet is significant," he added. "It's going to be more so as one goes on." Shar stressed that the University is attempting to go beyond offering standard information on the Internet and is trying to instead provide top-of-the-line medical reference material. "We need to provide access for researchers -- both internal and external," he explained, adding that the Web site must also "provide a resource to the community." The Web site currently offers potential patients a list of accepted health insurance plans, a calendar of upcoming events and a search engine to find area doctors by ZIP code and area of specialty. It also allows users to locate the doctors closest to them by clicking on a map. The Web site also includes resources intended for medical professionals -- such as online access to the PennToday magazine and the opportunity to be included in and search a comprehensive referral directory. And the Web site features a number of links of interest to both doctors and community members, including that of the University's Cancer Center. "We want to wind up positioning ourself as a quality health care environment rather than something that is just raw and straightforward advertising," Shar said, adding that he hopes for the Web site to continue broadening its range of service. The Web site currently features sites devoted to approximately 75 percent of the Medical School's departments. Shar predicted that, in addition to "expanding the number of departments that provide information on our site," the Health System Web site will "expand significantly in the area of health information." "I think that's probably where the largest resource actually is in terms of what the breadth of the site actually is," he noted. But Penn's Health System is not the only Philadelphia medical network to take advantage of the Internet's resources, and the University's two biggest health care rivals -- Allegheny and Thomas Jefferson universities -- both offer detailed medical information on their Web sites. The scope and depth of the available information from each school, however, clearly differ from what is available through Penn's Web site. Allegheny's Web site, for example, only describes medical care at some of its affiliate hospitals -- offering few links to other sources of information. Thomas Jefferson, by contrast, has equipped its Web site to steer users towards a variety of reference material from the university and other sources.