APA will soon be introducing a new benefit for members: Through a program called Your Practice Online, members will be able to create and maintain their own Web sites through which they will be able to provide psychiatric and practice-related information not only to their patients but to the public at large.

When patients and consumers are asked where they go on the Internet to find information regarding their health, an overwhelming majority state that they want their online health care information to come from their physician or a site that their physician recommends. Why? Although the Internet gives patients access to more than 15,000 health care Web sites, surveys show that patients trust their doctor to provide them with the best, most relevant information regarding their health. Not surprisingly, mental health issues rank as one of the most researched health categories on the Internet.

APA is offering the new member benefit through its involvement with Medem, a joint venture between APA, the AMA, and five other medical specialty societies. Medem’s mission is to use the Internet to place the physician back in the center of the health care world and help rebuild the doctor-patient relationship eroded by managed care. This network of societies and physicians has been formed to create a storehouse of information whose reliability and usefulness will be unmatched on the Internet.

Currently, patients go to the Internet, collect information that has varying degrees of accuracy, and ask their physicians to put it in context for them. With the new APA member benefit, patients will have a far more reliable and credible option: they will be able to go to the Web sites of APA members who have signed up for the service and find information specific to each member’s practice as well as information that members have selected from APA.

This member benefit will be available around the end of the first quarter of this year. To accomplish this, Medem will provide APA members with an online application that they, or someone in their office, can use to create a Web site.

This strategy will address several needs:

• Puts psychiatrists back in the center of the flow of information to their patients. As the time patients and physicians spend together during an office visit has decreased, more than 70 million Americans have utilized the technology of the Internet for health care advice and information. By creating a Web site, APA members will be a part of a network of trusted information that will empower them and their patients in managing care.

• Saves time and money. Members can post information on their Web sites that patients frequently request by phone, such as directions, phone and fax numbers, insurance plan information, and so on. Not only will posting such information on a Web site reduce phone calls from patients, but also it provides patients with a convenient way to access and download this information.

• Increases patient satisfaction. Patients can have immediate access to information about their psychiatrist and the information that he or she selected from APA.

APA will keep the membership updated via letters, e-mail, and articles in Psychiatric News as this new member benefit develops. Also, members will be able to register for the service at APA’s 2000 annual meeting in Chicago in May by visiting the Medem booth in the APA Resource Center in McCormick Place.

More information about this exhibit will appear in a future issue. In the meantime, additional information about Your Practice Online is available on the Web site <www.yourpracticeonline.com> and the Medem Web site <www.medem.com>.