NEO-TRIBES: THE POWER AND POTENTIAL OF ONLINE COMMUNITIES IN HEALTH CARE.

The article discusses online communities in relation to health care in the U.S. Almost 30% of Internet users in the country participate in medical or health-related groups. Such a large scale participation in online health care groups is motivated by the inability of contemporary medical practice to meet the needs of patients that go beyond their physical-medical treatment. The widespread popularity of online patient communities has emerged because of the ability of technology to satisfy these needs. An online community is composed of four essential elements consisting of people, purposes, protocols and technology. The members of such a community have shared purposes, and they interact socially by sticking to explicit protocols, rituals, and roles using Internet technologies that support interaction. The technology required in this case is not complex. A simple email-based online community can be created by setting up a listserv for a group of users. Similarly, others can be built using some combination of Web pages, chats, bulletin boards, email, instant messengers and databases.