Supporting Healthcare Knowledge Transfer through a Web 2.0 Portal - Insights from Austria

The internet has become a source of huge amounts of information related to healthcare; some is useful while other information can be misleading and even dangerous. Since it is not easy to distinguish the quality of web contents, a portal hosted and maintained by medical experts can lead to more credibility. This article presents the results of a study conducted in Austria that investigates the patients’ need for a web 2.0 knowledge transfer portal hosted and maintained by hospital doctors to provide high-quality information to its patients. The doctors’ appraisals concerning their patients’ demands as well as their willingness to participate in a web 2.0 health online portal by publishing information, by answering questions and supervising user generated contents are investigated. The survey was conducted online using two questionnaires, one for potential patients and one for hospital doctors of an Austrian central hospital. The results show that there is definitely great potential for a hospital to successfully establish a web 2.0 knowledge portal since the current quality of existing online health portals is not sufficient to meet the demands of at least one third of the polled patients