Who are we?

The Department of Applied Computing at the University of Dundee and the Asthma Research Unit at the Tayside Centre for General Practice provide Internet access to members of the General Practitioners in Asthma Group. The aim of this project was to help GPIAG members create WWW (World Wide Web) sites for their practice.

Purpose of the Project

An exponentially increasing number of patients access the Internet to search for answers to their questions. As a result of the increasing awareness and spread of electronic media and information, the Internet is growing rapidly.

Currently all General Medical Practices are required to produce an information leaflet about their practice giving details of GP names, surgery times, location, etc. Providing this information about General Practices via the Internet is increasingly appropriate.

Most GPs do not have the technical knowledge required to create HTML (HyperText Markup Language) pages, and cannot afford the time to learn how to do so. Assuming GPs are IT novices, it would be efficient to have a A software package which to assisted GPs to designing their practice WWW page was required. It would create a web page from the information entered, and would require minimal HTML knowledge from the GP.

"Web Doctor" was developed to meet this need. It is an intuitive piece of software which requires no technical knowledge to create HTML pages.   It is tuned to the requirements of GPs who are developing web pages for their General Practice.

Tackling the Problem

The requirement was to develop a WWW editor where the user needed no experience of the underlying computer language HTML.

The HTML code representing the information normally contained in the GP pamphlet would be generated automatically resulting in HTML files which can be submitted for hosting on the WWW.

Requirements for the software were gathered by interviewing GPs, investigating information presented in numerous practice leaflets; and comparing some 30 medical practice web sites that are already accessible on the Internet.

Conclusions

With the current increase in electronic information  web sites will become an essential format for every general practice’s patient leaflets.

A prototype of Web Doctor was developed, which was user-friendly and produced  the required WWW pages based on information that GP’s normally include on their practice leaflet.

The prototype was successfully evaluated by several practising GPs.

This project was carried out as part of N Ayyub's Honours Course in Applied Computing