This will make access to health care information more difficult. The Internet can provide a large repository of information available to large numbers of patients at any time provided the patients have access to the Internet. However, currently only about fifteen percent of the Canadian citizens has access to the Internet, and less than half of them are experienced navigators of the Internet. Thus, closing a library and replacing it with an Internet server can lead to reduced accessibility of information. Indexes to information on the Web are extremely large, and search engines often return hundreds of thousands of items.
User interfaces are also inconsistent leading to navigational problems for novice users.
There are many sources of unreliable medical information on the Internet which can actually lead inaccurate perceptions of health benefits and risks, and result in poorer medical decisions. The costs of maintaining realizable servers often exceeds significantly the cost of the original software and hardware purchases. Thus, the true cost of running a server is often underestimated. Users will increasingly expect their medical sources to be reliably accurate and accessible. An overview is given of work in progress to develop consistent easy to use indexes and user interfaces to medical web sites.