Virtual communities in health care: the case of "krebsgemeinschaft.de"

Abstract

This paper focuses on the process of designing, implementing and evaluating a community platform for cancer patients. Following an introduction to the situation of cancer patients in Germany we summarize our findings on cancer patients' demands for trustworthy information as well as their need for interaction with peers in similar situations. On this basis we describe the process of translating socio-technical needs into system requirements and the steps undertaken to develop a functioning community platform for cancer patients. We combine a generic iterative process model for systems' development with elements of prototyping towards an engineering process model for community platforms for cancer patients. We then describe the evaluation framework and first results.