---
title: "Informed Patients"
description: "Millions of Americans will welcome new access to industrial-strength health information -- but they'll miss the articles from one major journal."
date: "2005-06-16"
authors:
  - name: "Susannah Fox"
    job_title: "Former Researcher"
    link: "https://www.pewresearch.org/staff/susannah-fox/"
url: "https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2005/06/16/informed-patients/"
categories:
  - "Health Policy"
  - "Medicine & Health"
  - "Online Search"
---

# Informed Patients

Laura Landro’s column in the Wall Street Journal on 6/15/05 highlighted an upcoming service called [patientINFORM](http://www.patientinform.org/PI/home.jsp), which will create a one-stop shop for summaries of medical journal articles. Our [research](https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/topics.asp?c=5) has shown that millions of Americans will welcome this access to industrial-strength health information. The first three organizations sponsoring it are the [American Cancer Society](http://www.cancer.org/docroot/home/index.asp), the [American Diabetes Association](http://www.diabetes.org/home.jsp), and the [American Heart Association](http://www.heart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=1200000), which have versions of the new service on their sites now. Landro reports that two dozen publishers are participating – but not the Journal of the American Medical Association, one of the 800-pound gorillas of the genre. Their position is that they already have a [consumer-oriented page](http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/collection/patient_page?page=2) so there is no need to make it any easier for people to find their article summaries.

I was curious about the differences between the services, so I pretended to be searching for diabetes research. I first went to the ADA’s site and found their [patientINFORM page](http://www.diabetes.org/patientinform/default.jsp) which had 15 articles just about blood glucose control. Then I went to JAMA and found their [collection of 106 diabetes articles](http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/collection/diabetes_mellitus), but the full text versions are available only to subscribers and the collection does not include a link to any “Patient Pages” that I could see. I did stumble on a PDF of the JAMA Patient Page associated with a 2002 special issue on diabetes, helpfully entitled, [“The ABCs of Diabetes.”](http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/reprint/287/19/2608) It’s one page long – quite a bit different from the content available to subscribers or to internet users savvy enough to go to the patientINFORM sites.