An eight-year study of Internet-based remote medical counselling

Abstract

We carried out a prospective study of an Internet-based remote counselling service. A total of 15,456 Internet users visited the Website over eight years. From these, 1500 users were randomly selected for analysis. Medical counselling had been granted to 901 of the people requesting it (60%). One hundred and sixty-four physicians formed project groups to process the requests and responded using email. The distribution of patients using the service was similar to the availability of the Internet: 78% were from the European Union, North America and Australia. Sixty-seven per cent of the patients lived in urban areas and the remainder were residents of remote rural areas with limited local medical coverage. Sixty-five per cent of the requests were about problems of internal medicine and 30% of the requests concerned surgical issues. The remaining 5% of the patients sought information about recent developments, such molecular medicine or aviation medicine. During the project, our portal became inaccessible five times, and counselling was not possible on 44 days. There was no hacking of the Website. Internet-based medical counselling is a helpful addition to conventional practice.