Virtual communities in health care: the case of "krebsgemeinschaft.de"

This paper focuses on the process of designing, implementing and evaluating a community platform for cancer patients. Following an introduction to the situation of cancer patients in Germany we summarize our findings on cancer patients' demands for trustworthy information as well as their need for interaction with peers in similar situations. On this basis we describe the process of translating socio-technical needs into system requirements and the steps undertaken to develop a functioning community platform for cancer patients. We combine a generic iterative process model for systems' development with elements of prototyping towards an engineering process model for community platforms for cancer patients. We then describe the evaluation framework and first results.

[1]  Jennifer Preece,et al.  Online communities: a longitudinal analysis of communication activities , 2003, 36th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2003. Proceedings of the.

[2]  Dean Leffingwell,et al.  Managing software requirements: a unified approach , 1999 .

[3]  S. Singletary,et al.  Breast cancer on the world wide web: cross sectional survey of quality of information and popularity of websites , 2002, BMJ : British Medical Journal.

[4]  Jim Conallen,et al.  Building Web applications with UML , 1999 .

[5]  Jan Marco Leimeister,et al.  Mobile Virtual Healthcare Communities : An Approach To Community Engineering For Cancer Patients , 2002, ECIS.

[6]  Kim Binsted,et al.  Generating Personalised Patient Information Using the Medical Record , 1995, AIME.

[7]  Gunther Eysenbach,et al.  Consumer health informatics , 2000, BMJ : British Medical Journal.

[8]  D Charnock,et al.  Helping patients access high quality health information , 1999, BMJ.

[9]  B. Nonnecke,et al.  WHY LURKERS LURK , 2001 .

[10]  D E Forsythe,et al.  Using ethnography to build a working system: rethinking basic design assumptions. , 1992, Proceedings. Symposium on Computer Applications in Medical Care.

[11]  Martin Gaedke,et al.  Web Engineering , 2002, J. Web Eng..

[12]  Jan Marco Leimeister,et al.  CoPEP: a development process model for community platforms for cancer patients , 2003, ECIS.

[13]  Jenny Preece,et al.  Online Communities: Designing Usability and Supporting Sociability , 2000 .