Locating physicians on the world wide web: Managed and unmanaged health care delivery

The growing popularity of the World Wide Web (WWW) offers new opportunities for distributing information describing medical service providers to health care consumers, community referring physicians, patients, and professional co-workers. This article provides an overview of WWW-based physician directories now appearing on the Internet. It illustrates their features, capabilities, and limitations, and the motives of their WWW-site sponsors. Although the use of the Internet and WWW technology to identify and locate appropriate medical caregivers offers many potential benefits, the representation of medical expertise in this unexplored electronic medium is still rudimentary. This limits the quality of the match established between providers and seekers of medical services. Initiatives to improve the representation of physicians are essential, and they should include physicians, clinical administrators, and health care managers interested in maximizing the effectiveness of this new form of communication.