This fall APA began a campaign to make it easy for members to take advantage of a new member benefit—a Web site for their practice, created with the Medem "Your Practice Online" service. Members should have received an e-mail or mail notification from APA President Daniel Borenstein, M.D., which includes information on how to access a sample Web site customized for each member. (The e-mail notification includes a live hyperlink to the site.) After reviewing or revising the site, members then have the option to go "live" on the Internet—that is, make it accessible to others.

Each member’s sample site includes news, articles, and information from the APA patient education library, as well as general information about the member’s practice (for example, address, telephone number, insurance accepted, and clinical concentration). Sites can easily be modified and further customized by adding patient education content already in the APA/Medem library and the libraries of other Medem medical specialty members, practice announcements, and other information specific to the member’s practice. Members even have the option of changing the Web site address (URL). The Web site addresses will be in the name of your practice, not an APA or Medem address.

For those members in group practices, Medem’s Member Services can add their partners’ information to the site.

"Because APA realizes how important the Internet may be to the future practice of psychiatry, we wanted to make it as easy as possible for members to use Medem’s ‘Your Practice Online’ by building APA members’ Web sites and offering the sites to them for their review and approval," said APA Medical Director Steven Mirin, M.D. The APA/Medem network will also provide secure-messaging capability with patients in those cases where the physician finds this mode of communication convenient, effective, and efficient."

APA members now have a choice about how to support the cost of their Web sites. Members may accept paid sponsorship of their site; sponsors are expected to be pharmaceutical companies, though no sponsors exist at this time. Those who prefer not to accept sponsorship should contact Medem Member Services at (877) 926-3336. Members who choose the unsponsored option will not be charged for their site at this time, but a service fee, currently set at $30 a month, may have to be charged in the future to support the costs of maintaining the network. However, such fees will not be imposed from now through March 2001. Medem will give participants with unsponsored sites a minimum of 90 days’ notice before any fee is introduced.

Here are answers to some of the most commonly asked questions about Medem:

Q. What is sponsorship?

A. Sponsors for "Your Practice Online" practice Web sites are identified and approved by Medem and the Medem Board of Directors, who represent the founding societies of Medem, including APA and the AMA.

Q. How will sponsorship look on my practice Web site?

A. Medem Web site sponsorship will follow the AMA guidelines on sponsorship and advertising. These guidelines are posted on the AMA’s Web site at <www.ama-assn.org/about/guidelines.htm>. Questions about content, advertising, sponsorship, privacy, and confidentiality are also addressed in the AMA guidelines. There will be one or more accompanying logos recognizing any sponsorship support on the right hand side of your homepage. If a viewer chooses to click on the sponsor’s logo, he or she will be taken to an explanation page that says the viewer is leaving your site and advises the viewer that neither Medem nor you assumes any responsibility for content of other Web sites.

A. No, accepting sponsorship on your Web site does not violate APA’s or the AMA’s ethics code because sponsorship does not constitute a gift to individual physicians.

This past summer the AMA Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs determined that sponsorship of members’ Web sites must be done in the form of unrestricted educational grants to Medem. These grants, provided by industry for the purpose of education and scientific conferences, are deemed ethical under the AMA’s Code of Medical Ethics.

To further ensure the integrity of each member’s Web site, all sponsors will be acknowledged in the same way on all member Web sites with the statement: "Produced by Medem, with sponsorship support from [names and logos of supporters]."