2.1. Health Care Consumers
Clearly, health care consumers face a wide range
of complex information gathering and decision
making tasks. One of the most challenging
information-gathering tasks is to become educated
with respect to a particular illness and the various
treatment options or lifestyle changes that can help.
Health care consumers gain such clinical knowledge
from practitioners, the medical literature, and to an
increasing extent through Internet resources.
Investigating health-related issues is one of the most
often pursued Web-based activities and there are
many informative Web sites offering in-depth
coverage. However, education is only one of the
challenges facing health care consumers. A second
challenge is to understand the more operational
aspects of the health care delivery system, including
the clinical focus and experience of practitioners and
hospitals. Some questions that might be supported
by data warehousing technologies and integrated
access to fine-grained data are the following