Virtual communities in health care: roles, requirements and restrictions

Community platforms on the Internet have the great potential to serve ubiquitous information and interaction needs. This applies especially in the health care domain, where the need for information and interaction is ubiquitous as well as often spontaneous and of a long term nature. The potential users are from all levels of society and therefore have different experience with the usage of the medium Internet. But there are no recommended actions how to develop and maintain a community for patients in the health care domain. Instead there are several challenges that need to be met throughout the development and maintenance of a platform in such a domain. So as to achieve the greatest congruency between the patients ’ needs and the services of the platform both the potential users needed to get involved into the development process and a sound evaluation of the conceptualised product is necessary. Furthermore the offered information must be quality assured. Taking this into account, we conceptualised and implemented a community platform www.krebsgemeinschaft.de for breast cancer and leukaemia patients, their relatives and anyone interested in information about cancer. The article gives an overview of the used methods and focuses on the specialties in the health care domain