Patient web portals, disease management, and primary prevention.

Background: Efforts aimed at health care reform and continued advances in information technologies have prompted interest among providers and researchers in patient web portals. Patient web portals are password-protected online websites that offer the patients 24-hour access to personal health information from anywhere with an Internet connection.

Methods: This article, which is based upon bibliographic searches in PubMed, reviews important developments in web portals for primary and secondary disease prevention, including patient web portals tethered to electronic medical records, disease-specific portals, health disparities, and health-related community web portals.

Local development of MCQ tests for evidence-based medicine and clinical decision making can be successful.

Background: Guidelines for the design of multiple-choice item (MCQ) tests of evidence-based medicine (EBM) and clinical decision making (CDM) have not been published.

Purpose And Methods: We describe a strategy to develop an EBM/CDM MCQ test database guided by educational theory and used psychometric analyses, including reliability, validity, and item analyses, to judge the strategy's success.

Results: The internal consistency reliability of tests derived from the database was in the good-to-excellent range (0.