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Universal Health Information on the Web: patient education materials for all!

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No matter their health concerns, whether in a trauma ICU or an outpatient clinic, patients and their families thirst for information explaining medical conditions, treatments, outcomes, and impact on daily living. Healthcare professionals and information professionals alike frequently face the difficult job of providing often complex (yet reliable) information in language that is linguistically, culturally, and age-appropriate so that patients and their families can understand it. While a number of excellent proprietary products are available to help healthcare professionals, dozens of free resources on the web can also serve as valuable sources of quality health information.

Certain health-related websites contain original content, authored or edited by experts in the field specifically for that particular site. Other websites are information portals, where librarians or healthcare professionals can select and organize links to point users toward original sources of health information. MedlinePlus [http://www.medlineplus.gov], for example, created by the National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine, follows strict criteria [http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/criteria.html] in selecting, organizing, and linking to other authoritative health information sites. Now with more than 750 health-related topics, MedlinePlus also includes the A.D.A.M. Medical Encyclopedia [http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/encyclopedia.html] and a drug and supplement database that lets users locate information on a particular drug either by the brand or generic name. Information is organized by body location/system, particular age groups, special topics (e.g., sexual health issues), or by treatments. Valuable "canned" (pre-strung search strategies) MEDLINE searches can help patients and professionals search the medical literature for the latest journal articles related to a particular condition or topic. MedlinePlus is also available in Spanish.

NOAH [http://www.noah-health.org] began as a New Yorkcentric resource (hence the origin of its acronym, New York Online Access to Health), and while it still caters to this locality by listing local resources, it has since grown into a resource for those living outside the five boroughs. "Your link to quality-filtered consumer health information," NOAH began as a joint partnership between four library organizations. It relies on its editorial staff of librarians and health professionals to "find, select, and organize full-text consumer health information that is current,...