Persons with disability from spinal cord injury (SCI) are subject to high risk of pathological events and need a regular followup\r\neven after discharge from the rehabilitation hospital. To help in followup, we developed a web portal for providing online\r\nspecialist as well as GP support to SCI persons. After a feasibility study with 13 subjects, the portal has been introduced in the\r\nregional healthcare network in order to make it compliant with current legal regulations on data protection, including smartcard\r\nauthentication. Although a number of training courses have been made to introduce SCI persons to portal use (up to 50 users),\r\nthe number of accesses remained very low. Reasons for that have been investigated by means of a questionnaire submitted to the\r\ninitial feasibility study subjects and included the still easier use of telephone versus our web-based smartcard-authenticated portal,\r\nin particular, because online communications are still perceived as an unusual way of interacting with the doctor. To summarize,\r\nthe overall project has been appreciated by the users, but when it is time to ask for help to, the specialist, it is still much easier to\r\nmake a phone call.
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