The Dutch Website 'SeniorGezond' : an illustration of a road map for the informed patient

With the advent of the Internet and its increasing popularity, delivering health prevention is taking on a new form and shape. Internet-based health prevention aims not only to reach more efficiently a wider population but also to sustain an effective communication between patients and the emerging "virtual" healthcare professionals. This paper describes the development and evaluation of a Dutch informative website called SeniorGezond aimed at the elderly population in the domain of fall prevention. The website is a good illustration of how to address the many challenges faced by the Internet consumer of health related information, namely that of accessing good information quality, of searching for relevant information, of comprehending the information retrieved and of acting upon this information. Theoretical models have played a central role in the development process of the website. While the theoretical models should remain transparent to the user, we argue that they act as a support to the road map for patients and citizens. This road map helps to ensure that they can rely on sound information, are given enough breadth of functionalities to efficiently search and are supplied with the appropriate contextualized information that takes into account their existing knowledge of the topics they are searching for.