Health Online.

• Author: KAELBLE, STEVE
• Position: Community Hospitals Indianapolis website

Connecting with patients through the Internet

Some people say that hanging out in Internet chat rooms is unhealthy. But folks who log onto the Web Site run by Community Hospitals Indianapolis are finding that online chat can be good for their health.

The hospital has set tip a groundbreaking service allowing online chat with a nurse. It's available to anyone in Indiana, giving Internet surfers the ability to discuss health issues-even embarrassing ones- anonymously with someone in the know.

It's part of what the hospital calls its "e-health strategy," according to Dan Rench, director of e-business for Community Hospitals Indianapolis. "We're trying to provide a Web site that is an electronic facility for people to interact with us."

Community Hospitals finds the Internet useful for reaching three separate constituencies: consumers, physicians and employees. "Within each of those we've tried to pick smart targets of things that will have real value," Rench says.

The hospital reaches consumers through its ehealthindiana.com site. Its most cutting-edge feature is the chat service. "We're the only hospital in the country doing chat that I know of," Rench says. "Our nurses provide health information and advice for non-emergencies." Among the common topics are sexually transmitted diseases and children's health matters.

The chat service is a logical extension of the hospital's nurse-staffed call center. For just over a decade Community has operated an "Ask-a-Nurse" service making nurses available to the public by telephone. Depending on the time of day, anywhere from two to five nurses devote their time to fielding calls from people with health concerns.

The nurses running the chat service are the same ones working in the call center, Rench says, but for online chat they have some tools at their disposal that they don't have on the phone. For example, the nurses can call up articles and illustrations relating to the health issue about which they've been asked, then feed the information to the Web browser of the person with whom they're chatting.

"Nurses feel more empowered," Rench says. "They have the ability to be doing real-time communication and they have a tool set."

MOVING PAST "BROCHUREWARE"

What Community is doing illustrates the evolution of hospital-based Web activities. As with most businesses and organizations, hospitals first took to the Internet with what Web marketers call "brochureware" essentially online versions of already...