For the past few months, APA members have been told about Medem and one of its services, Your Practice Online. But how does this service work, and what will your Web site look like when it’s finished? And why would you want a Web site anyway?

There are many reasons for physicians and their practices to get online. For starters, 77 percent of patients are already looking for medical information on the Web, and what they find on the information frontier can influence the relationship they have with their physicians. Your Medem site is a natural place for your patients to start looking for answers, and you can be confident they’ll find it a rich source of credible, authoritative information.

Having a Web site can also help introduce your practice to people actively seeking medical advice and treatment. When the Medem consumer health care information site debuts late this summer, it will have a "physician finder," and patients in your area who use this service will automatically pull up your site.

For current patients, a Web site can field routine questions, from "How do I get to your office?" to "What are risperidone’s side effects?" to "What med school did you attend?"

As well as being a source of reliable health care information, Medem can put the latest psychiatric news at the fingertips of your patients and the public.

If you haven’t already built your Web site, here’s how it works:

1. Get on the Web and go to <www.yourpracticeonline.com>. When you sign up for the service, you will first create a login name and password. You’ll use them to enter the Site Builder Wizard, which will lead you in plain English through the site-creation process. No computer expertise is required.

2. You’ll tell the Site Builder whether you are building a group or solo practice site and enter your practice’s name.

3. Next you’ll choose a Web address ("URL"), an important part of the process. You can choose a URL ending in medem.com (as in www.Springfield Psychiatric.medem.com), psychmd.org (as in www.SpringfieldPsychiatric. psychmd.org), yourmd.com (as in www.SpringfieldPsychiatric.yourmd.com). To get your first choice of URL, you should sign up as soon as you can.

4. After you’ve picked your URL, you can choose how your Web site will look. Right now Medem offers three basic styles and three color schemes, which you can mix and match. Over time, there will be new combinations to choose from. Anytime you want to change the look of your site, whether it’s in the next five minutes, five months, or five years, you can choose from any of the available layouts and colors with the click of a button.

5. Medem can help you create some basic parts of your new site—a biographical page for each doctor, an online map to your office, a list of what specialties are covered in your practice and what procedures your office handles, the insurance you accept (and for which insurers you are accepting new patients), your philosophy of care, and more. If there isn’t a template to suit your needs, you can also create a customized Web page with its own name, text, and images. You can even tweak the layout with help from Medem’s member services if you want a specific look. You can contact Medem by phone toll free at (877) 926-3336 or by e-mail at info@medem.com.

6. In addition to these basic pages, the Site Builder Wizard allows you to add different sorts of information to your practice home page. You can choose to receive a news feed that puts the latest news from up to three specialties on your homepage, a feature that can keep patients coming back to your site. You can select trusted clinical health care information from Medem’s growing online library to feature on your site, and your patients will be able to search Medem’s entire collection from the nation’s leading medical societies. Medem can also help you post your own patient information brochures, announcements about your practice, and digital photos in the common GIF and JPEG formats.

If you sign up now, you should be able to start building now. The Site Builder Wizard makes it easy for you to plug in information about your practice and easily come away with a professional-looking Web site. If you have any questions about using the Site Builder Wizard, Medem’s support staff is available to help 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They can be reached by e-mail at info@medem.com or by phone at (877) 926-3336.