When Air Is Rare: Behind the Scenes of an Asthma Web Site

Abstract

Objective: The number of medical Web sites has increased tremendously during the past 5 years. While the quality of the content has also been on the rise, some questions are still open: Where are users referred from, how large is the target audience, and how do they behave during their visit? Methods: The Asthma Information Center is an independent Web site for physicians, patients, and other health care professionals providing information about asthma. Besides mirroring electronic documents of the Global Initiative for Asthma, numerous interactive pages have been constructed. Main outcome measures: logfiles of the Web server were analyzed for a 5-year interval for numbers of page views, visitors, visits, and external referring sites. Results: The number of visitors has increased since 1995, up to 100,000 page views at the end of the observation interval. In February 2000 approximately 9000 visitors were recorded per month. 3.4 pages were retrieved per visit, which lasted on average 1:57 min. Users are referred primarily by portal sites and only to a lesser extent by search engines. Conclusions: The audience is large for a specialized medical Web site. Users are usually referred from nonmedical sites. They are seeking fast information, most probably as a second opinion after having consulted their physician.

• Asthma
• Health care
• Electronic Resources
• Internet