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BMJ No 7124 Volume 316 Letters Saturday 3 January 1998 Epidemiological data can be gathered with world wide web Editor, In their note, 'Piloting patient attitudinal surveys on the web' Suchard et al rightly point out that the web is a powerful resource to use in developing surveys quickly and effectively.(1) But the power of the web goes far beyond that. Psychologists and sociologists are already using the web for surveys,(2) and there has also been a recent experiment to collect health status information for medical outcomes research with a web based questionnaire.(3) The web may further become a new means of gathering data from patients for studies of quality of life and epidemiological research, as it allows questionnaires to reach a worldwide population of patients and healthy controls with a minimum of cost and time. Researchers may rapidly explore various hypotheses - for example, about relations between a disease and its symptoms, predisposing factors, patients' demographic data, and associations with other diseases. In an experiment with a web based questionnaire about atopic eczema we are making use of the fact that dermatological patients, especially those with chronic diseases, are usually well informed about their disease and may therefore answer questions about their symptoms precisely. We developed a web based patient information system about atopic eczema to attract patients to our website and provide an electronic questionnaire to explore the relation between atopic stigmata and symptoms, demographic data, and environmental factors.(4) As an incentive for filling in the questionnaire, an atopy score is calculated(5) and presented to the user. Answers of all users are stored anonymously in our database for further analysis. At present, each month about 240 patients and healthy web surfers as controls complete the questionnaire. With Internet questionnaires one may obtain data from an entirely different population of patients to those seen in a clinical setting. For example, minimal variants of atopic eczema are not severe enough for patients to see their doctor, so patients taking part in a questionnaire study on the world wide web are different from the population seen at university hospitals. It will therefore be interesting to compare data obtained via the world wide web with published data obtained by traditional questionnaires. Obviously, the web community is not a representative sample of the whole population, and results obtained with questionnaires on the web are biased towards self selection; thus they must be interpreted with care and verified in an unbiased population. Gunther Eysenbach Medical doctor email: eysenbach@derma.med.uni-erlangen.de Thomas L Diepgen Consultant physician email: diepgen@derma.med.uni-erlangen.de University Hospital Erlangen, Department of Dermatology, Unit of Medical Informatics, Epidemiology and Public Health, 91052 Erlangen, Germany References 1 Suchard M A, Adamson S, Kennedy S. Netpoints: piloting patient attitudinal surveys on the web. BMJ 1997;315:529. (30 August.) 2 Batinic B. How to make an internet based survey. http://www.psychol.uni-giessen.de/~Batinic/survey/faq_soft.htm [accessed 26.9.97]. 3 Bell D S; Kahn-C E Jr. Health status assessment via the world wide web. Proceedings of the American Medical Informatics Association annual fall symposium, Washington, DC. 1996:33-42. 4 http://www.derma.med.uni-erlangen.de/cgi-bin/atopiefrage/erster-e.asp 5 Diepgen T L, Sauerbrei W, Fartasch M. Development and validation of diagnostic scores for atopic dermatitis incorporating criteria of data quality and practical usefulness. J Clin Epidemiol 1996;49:1031-8. Home | Current issue | Past issues | Classified ads | Career Focus | Feedback Collections | About this site | About the BMJ | BMA | Medline