3 Gateways That Can Get You to Your Destination More Quickly
The number of health-related Web sites has now hit 15,000 to 20,000, a most daunting number to consumers trying to find specific information. Search engines, popular starting places, are often hit-or-miss; you can be inundated with thousands of extraneous sites that clutter your returns.
Sometimes you can take a guess to find what you’re looking for, typing in what may or may not be a Web address, and get lucky. Cancer.org, for instance, is the high-quality informational site of the American Cancer Society. But try asthma.com or asthma.org and you come up empty.
That’s why gateways, Web sites that directly link you to a pre-selected group of information sources organized by category, are such valuable assets. These shortcuts help funnel your searches in the right direction. The better the gateway, the more efficiently you can get where you’re going.
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Here’s a look at three very different health care gateways--designed to steer your online journeys in the right direction.
* Medlineplus (https://www.medlineplus.gov): The National Institutes of Health’s library, the National Library of Medicine, has a consumer-friendly gateway called Medlineplus. Sure, you can access Medline, the library’s electronic database, which provides references to more than 11 million articles from more than 4,000 biomedical journals, but the “plus” is where it’s at.
The site bills itself as a gold mine, and I agree--think of it as a cross between Healthfinder.gov (the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ gateway) and Medline. You’ll find links to scores of information on diseases and conditions, dictionaries, lists of hospitals and physicians, drug information, health information in Spanish and other languages, news and clinical trials--all very thorough and selected for you by the staff of the National Library of Medicine so you know you’re getting trustworthy information. (The selection policy is clearly stated.) Searching on asthma, for instance, will return a page with links to governmental and nongovernmental resources separated by type of category (coping, statistics, treatment, Spanish) and a pre-set search of Medline articles on asthma. Pretty darned convenient.
* Achoo (https://www.achoo.com): Everyone has a different definition of ideal, so here’s a gateway with a different look. I found it a bit busy and confusing at first. But focusing on the Achoo search function, I again plugged in “asthma,” for the sake of comparison. It turned up 116 sites, ranging from the American College of Allergy Asthma & Immunology and the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology (ah! the association names I couldn’t recall when guessing at asthma Web addresses) to a German (I think) site about allergies, as well as some personal sites. Achoo also allows you to search the Web, Medline and the Merck Manual of Medical Information (a medical textbook). You can even check stock prices in the commerce section. But this gateway has not reviewed all the sites it lists, so click at your own risk.
* Medsurfer (https://www.medsurfer.com): Medsurfer is a unique find--not as comprehensive as Medlineplus but full of surprises. It was started, and is maintained, by a medical student at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. He found himself spending a good deal of time online looking for information for his studies and wanted to share what he found with his colleagues--and the broader community. He basically took his bookmarks (saved favorite Web sites) and made them available to anyone who can find his site. There’s some advertising, but the first-year resident says the people (mostly medical students, he figures) going to his site are not clicking on the ads so he’s not making any money. Oh, well. He’ll just continue to pay the hosting fee, and we get to surf to our heart’s content.
The site is divided into three quick pathways: one for students and residents, one for physicians and one for patients and families. However, there’s plenty of overlap. Our young doctor has stayed away from sites sponsored by individual physicians (a bit too self-promotional, he says). The criteria he uses to select the sites are not stated; he simply uses his judgment, which I found generally solid. There’s lots of good stuff here, but I did find a link that went nowhere and had some concerns about the general nature of the site. For example, the search results on asthma provided an extensive list categorized under pulmonary medicine, but the third result was a list of government sites. Sure, some of these would provide me with information about asthma, but not any faster or more directly than I could find on my own.
But, hey, take it for what it is--a medical student’s online guide. This guy was nice enough to make his bookmarks (even sports-related ones) public, and he updates the site weekly during his “spare time.” On my own, I never would have found a site that allowed me to hear the wheezing sounds of an 8-year-old with asthma or take a five-second roller-coaster ride through a colon. Unbelievable. Thank you, doctor-to-be Adarsh Gupta.
So cut down your random guessing at URLs and aimless Web wanderings. These gateways will help speed up--or at least decrease the bumps in--your online trip.
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Marla Bolotsky is managing editor and director of online information for the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. She can be reached at marla.bolotsky@latimes.com. Your Health Online runs the first and third Mondays of every month. Cathy K. Purcell contributed to this report.