American Indian/Alaska Natives Health Site Underway

The federally sponsored healthfinder gateway (www.healthfinder.gov) is being enlarged with a new section specifically concerning online resources for American Indians and Alaska natives. healthfinder is a free guide to reliable health information from the federal government and its many partner organizations, coordinated by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service's Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (ODPHP). The site links to over 5700 handpicked resources from 1800 health organizations, including government agencies, not-for-profits, and educational and health institutions.

The site includes the comprehensive "Health Library," which highlights prevention, wellness, and other popular topics for quick and easy searching; "Health News" has updated information; "Health Care" features information about providers and insurance; and "Just for You" includes specific resources for all phases of life. In 2001, the site was expanded to include healthfinder español to provide an easy-to-use Spanish-language consumer resource. A special section, healthfinder kids, helps children learn how to be healthy.

Susan Cuviello, a former nurse who is now the executive director at Superior Consultants, which was hired by the ODPHP to manage the healthfinder operation, told LJ that all the sites are selected by herself and another manager and then reevaluated every three years to ensure they are still active and providing accurate and useful content. Very few dot-com sites are included. "The other content manager and I look at all the web sites," Cuviello said, "and discern what their content is, where they get it from, how frequently it is evaluated for medical currency, and how the content is created: Do they have a medical board that reviews it? What backgrounds do their medical writers have? etc. It is an in-depth process."

The American Indian and Alaska Natives site shares some content with other previous sections. "We had initial content already," Cuviello said, "but the content wasn't necessarily tagged for this population. We went in and looked at what their major diseases are. If you look on alcoholism there might not be just an article on native Alaskans, it might be on the broader subject. But we tried to pick out things that were pertinent to that population."

American Indian and Alaskan Natives will undergo usability testing; Cuviello and her colleagues are already laying the groundwork for the next installment in the database—Asian American/Pacific Islanders—which will launch in May 2003.

Since healthfinder's debut in 1997, the site has received over 350 million hits. More than five million people are expected to access its resources in 2002. healthfinder has won several web site awards, and it is on the Medical Library Association's list of Top Ten Trusted Health Sites.