Assisting Users Seeking Medical Information through Government Portals

Abstract

There has been an explosion in the number of different types of portals in the last decade, and at the same time there has been a lot of confusion with them, especially in relation to the enormous number of portals and their differences from Web sites or Web-pages. This coincides with increased use by consumers seeking medical information on the Internet, and with the important role played by medical portals for evidence based medicine. This article explores current portal technology available from an evaluation of market leaders in the industry and identifies important functional components that are necessary in building an intelligent portal to assist users seeking information on the Internet. The emphasis will be on government to consumer portals (G2C) and uses two reputable government portals Betterhealth and Healthinsite as examples to discuss issues involved with those.