Sammanfattning
Short-stay hospital treatments reduce patients’ opportunity to meet each other and share
experiences. Therefore an application for online social support was integrated into a health
informatics tool developed to meet the information and communication needs for men with prostate
cancer. This paper reports on the men’s experience of using the application for online social support.
The findings demonstrate that older Danish men with cancer find it quite natural to communicate with
each other using the Internet. However, the study signifies the complexity in designing online social
support groups. When designing such applications, it is necessary to consider different types of
users, and see these different users’ involvement, and their different stages of user activities, as a
central part of the design strategy. Thus, a core element appears to be the need to always see the
user involvement as a central part of the design strategy. It is essential to constantly learn more
about the users and their needs, to continuously redesign the applications. From that perspective the
term Patient 2.0 only illustrates one phase in an on-going evolution of roles between the partners in
the healthcare sector as these roles are constantly being influenced by new technologies.