Quality assurance processes for designing patient education web sites.

In the future, more nurses and other healthcare professionals will be providing patient education on the Internet. Having knowledge of processes that lead to quality patient education Web site design is essential. These quality assurance processes include determining the site's purpose, selecting the user population, establishing the expected clinical and learning outcomes, providing an educational framework, incorporating specific design principles, and multiple and ongoing site evaluation. Therefore, Web site development processes designed to undergird quality patient education are presented, and an example Web site is used to illustrate them.