Pandemic Timeline

Gunther Eysenbach founds the Journal of Medical Internet Research


Gunther Eysenbach is the first Infodemiologist.

Why does the world need the JMIR? The Internet – and more specifically, the World-Wide-Web – has an impact on many areas of medicine – broadly we can divide them into “clinical information and telemedicine”, “medical education and information exchange” and “consumer health informatics”:

  • First, Internet protocols are used for clinical information and communication. In the future, Internet technology will be the platform for many telemedical applications.
  • Second, the Internet revolutionizes the gathering, access and dissemination of non-clinical information in medicine: Bibliographic and factual databases are now world-wide accessible via graphical user interfaces, epidemiological and public health information can be gathered using the Internet, and increasingly the Internet is used for interactive medical education applications.
  • Third, the Internet plays an important role for consumer health education, health promotion and teleprevention. (As an aside, it should be emphasized that “health education” on the Internet goes beyond the traditional model of health education, where a medical professional teaches the patient: On the Internet, much “health education” is done “consumer-to-consumer” by means of patient self support groups organizing in cyberspace. These patient-to-patient interchanges are becoming an important part of healthcare and are redefining the traditional model of preventive medicine and health promotion).

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