Health 2.0 in Practice: a Review of German Health Care Web Portals

Contemporary studies show that the usage of health-related web portals increases continuously. Additionally, the internet’s usage is in a transition towards more user participation by allowing more and more user generated content. In the area of health care this development is commonly called health 2.0; a development that leads more patients and doctors to actively participate and contribute on health portals their virtual communities. This results in numerous opportunities for health care providers to capitalize on online health communities. In order to aid the understanding of this emerging trend, this paper presents an extensive analysis of up-to-date German web portals that provide health-related content from a user perspective. They are classified as well as clustered according to their characteristics regarding usage of web 2.0 technologies and health care specialization. With this clustered overview of the current health care web portals this paper tries to clarify the term health 2.0. Additionally, general design options for health care portals are drawn from the analyzed web portals and state-of-the-art literature to aid in the development of new health care portals.