Educating the patient: challenges and opportunities with current technology

Patients using the Internet are inundated with abundant information on health care that may be correct and may be incorrect. It is becoming the role of clinicians to enable patients to educate themselves by providing information about accurate and reliable Web sites, and to answer questions from literature that patients encounter. In addition, there is a myriad of technological advances to help patients and clinicians access, retrieve, and file information, and numerous communication tools to foster the patient-clinician dialog. This article provides an overview and some recommendations for clinicians to help patients better use information to achieve better outcomes.