Since being founded in 1996 it has grown to 1.2 million members worldwide. Its second venture, CBSMedscape , was developed jointly with CBS Corporation and launched in September. This site provides authoritative medical content written for consumers, access to the content on Medscape, and interactive health management tools such as health diaries. In addition, Medscape has a partnership with America Online to provide consumer health information, including CBSMedscape, to five AOL portals reaching the largest consumer audience on the Web. Lundberg said 36 percent of people online are looking for medical or health-related information.
Health is the fifth-largest area searched on the Web.
However, the problem with the medical Internet, he said, is that it is nearly impossible to regulate, the information is of variable quality, and security can be poor. If these basic questions can't be answered, Lundberg said the site should not be used for practicing medicine or for health care in general. Lundberg also predicted that email medicine will replace phone contact between established patients and their doctors and that prescription refills will also be handled over the Internet. Lundberg said he has been predicting since the 1960s that doctors were going to start significantly using computers, but that is only now beginning to happen. He said in 1995, only about 3 percent of U.S. physicians were going on the Internet for information, but in 1999 that figure rose to 80 percent.