Using health web sites for patient education.

There are thousands of health web sites, but because of the unregulated nature of the Internet, not all sites provide accurate, complete, and up-to-date information. Nurses have an important role in evaluating health web sites and directing patients to quality sites with information they can understand. The purpose of this article is to describe how to evaluate health web sites and use them as a component of patient education. An evaluation of web sites on wound care is included as a means of illustrating issues patients face when searching the Internet for health information.