Abstracts

Rationale: The importance of the Internet to patient education and physician/nurse professional development is growing rapidly. Access to medical information must be immediate, relevant, credible, and easy to use. Users demand focused and well-indexed content developed according to the defined needs of the target audiences. The Epilepsy Therapy Development Project (EDTP), established websites to provide comprehensive content to epilepsy patients, families, caregivers, and healthcare professionals. Methods: ETDP websites were examined to determine viewer patterns, trends over time, and changes in level of content accessed. Data from March 2007 served as a sample of viewer habits. Web pages concerning related content were pooled where appropriate. The sites reviewed included: www.epilepsy.com (PT, patient/caregiver, debut 10/03), http://professionals.epilepsy.com (PR, professionals 12/04), and www.my.epilepsy.com (ME, community information exchange, 9/05).Results: In March 2007, 1,147,664 combined page views (PT 831,145 ME 253,092 PR 63,428) represented a 7% increase over the previous month, continuing a trend toward steady growth monthly for all sites. There were 205,850 unique visitors (PT 138,385 ME 21,537, PR 45,928). Visitors came from across the US (70.5%) and around the world. The vast majority were new visitors (PT 92% ME 93% PR 95%), with some returning weekly. Community users were overwhelmingly interested in basic information, especially seizure medications (167,384 views) and epilepsy 101 (133,634 views). Specific topics had much smaller numbers. Of the audience-specific topics, people stories (27,061), family (14,320), children (13,036) were visited most frequently. Professionals most often entered the site directly, viewing more specific epilepsy topics; areas on diagnosis, co-morbid disorders, epilepsy syndromes, and hormonal aspects attracted 49%, while the resource library of tools, tables, and articles were used by 21%. Most frequent downloads were information on specific AEDs (41% - 61%), followed by first aid and treatment tools (15%). Clinical trials information attracted 8167 views. Conclusions: Use of the epilepsy.com family of websites is growing steadily. Community viewers tend to enter looking for basic information, articles about AEDs, and for support from others in the epilepsy community with information exchanges, chat rooms, and blogs. Healthcare professionals enter for both general information and to research specific questions, such as coexisting disorders and causes of epilepsy. A growing trend of using the website to access resource tools for clinical practice and using forms of experiential learning is noted, deriving from PR website features new in the past year. More research is needed to determine user satisfaction, and whether viewers exit when they have satisfied an information need or because they have not met their specific need. Work is in progress to better inform users about what is available. (Funding Support: Epilepsy Therapy Development Project,a not-for-profit foundation)