Official Websites of Local Health Centers in Taiwan: A Nationwide Study

Ya-Chuan Hsu, Tzeng-Ji Chen, Feng-Yuan Chu, Hao-Yen Liu, Li-Fang Chou and Shinn-Jang Hwang
Additional contact information
Ya-Chuan Hsu: Department of Family Medicine, Taipei Veterans General Hospital, No. 201, Sec. 2, Shi-Pai Road, Taipei 112, Taiwan
Tzeng-Ji Chen: Department of Family Medicine, Taipei Veterans General Hospital, No. 201, Sec. 2, Shi-Pai Road, Taipei 112, Taiwan
Feng-Yuan Chu: Department of Family Medicine, Taipei Veterans General Hospital, No. 201, Sec. 2, Shi-Pai Road, Taipei 112, Taiwan
Hao-Yen Liu: Department of Family Medicine, Taipei Veterans General Hospital, No. 201, Sec. 2, Shi-Pai Road, Taipei 112, Taiwan
Li-Fang Chou: Department of Public Finance, National Chengchi University, Taipei 116, Taiwan
Shinn-Jang Hwang: Department of Family Medicine, Taipei Veterans General Hospital, No. 201, Sec. 2, Shi-Pai Road, Taipei 112, Taiwan

IJERPH, 2019, vol. 16, issue 3, 1-10

Abstract: Local health centers (LHCs) play a key role in public health. Because it has now become popular to seek health information on the Internet, an effective website is indispensable to an LHC. Our study aimed to survey the official websites of LHCs in Taiwan with an evaluation framework. All 369 LHCs in Taiwan were surveyed in March 2018. The evaluation indicators included health information, online interactive services, technical features, institutional information, links to external resources, website management, the last updated time, and number of visitors. The indicators were stratified by the urbanization levels of the LHCs. In total, 98.0% ( n = 360) of the LHCs had official websites. The majority ( n = 241) of the websites were updated within the past 30 days, and most of the websites ( n = 353) provided health information. However, the information provided varied considerably. Few LHCs ( n = 31) provided online interactive services in terms of an online appointment function. In terms of providing online consultation services, rural LHCs outperformed suburban and urban LHCs (16.4% versus 14.5% and 6.0%, respectively). Most LHCs in Taiwan do not seem to take full advantage of the Internet, with their websites typically serving as static bulletin boards instead of new channels of communication. Further studies could focus on the effectiveness of these websites.

Keywords: public health administration; Internet; patient portals; Taiwan (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/16/3/399/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/16/3/399/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:16:y:2019:i:3:p:399-:d:202190

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().