Improving on-line skills and knowledge. A randomized trial of teaching rural physicians to use on-line medical information.

OBJECTIVE To assess the change in frequency and methods with which a pilot group of rural physicians consulted on-line medical resources before and after an educational intervention.

DESIGN Physicians were randomly assigned to an educational intervention or control group. Self-administered questionnaires were completed before and 3 months after the intervention.

SETTING Rural practices in southwestern Ontario.

PARTICIPANTS Eighty rural (defined as a population of 15000 or less) physicians in southwestern Ontario, with a computer with Internet access.

INTERVENTIONS Individualized 3-hour training session on using the World Wide Web to research patient-related questions.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Frequency of access and comfort with on-line medical information were compared after intervention with baseline data using the Wilcoxon two-sample test.

RESULTS At follow up, the intervention group showed a significant improvement over the control group in their frequency of accessing the World Wide Web to address patient-related questions (P = .009), in their comfort level in using on-line databases (P = .032), and in their frequency of accessing on-line databases (P = .044).

CONCLUSION Rural physicians' comfort and competence in using computers to address patient problems can be improved by an individualized 3-hour training session.