Joseph Woo, MD

Dr. Joseph Woo has made a great contribution on the Internet with the development of his world renown web site Obstetric Ultrasound. We interviewed Dr. Woo to get some insights about his work and the reasons behind the development of the site. Following are the thoughts he shared with us.

OBGYN.net: How are you serving the Ob/Gyn community with Internet Technology?

Dr. Woo: I have served on the Council of the Hong Kong Obstetrical and Gynecological Society for many years ( probably over 15 ), and was happy to see the Society's Homepage up recently. The prevalence of medical Net users is as yet not great in Hong Kong and the number of hits to the society's homepage is still small, but it's mere existence has started a lot of members surfing the Internet and using it as a serious information source.

I developed the Ultrasound website in 1995 and counting the number of e-mail which I receive everyday on the various aspects of ultrasound in pregnancy I think there is a definite demand for such a site on the Internet. Many of those who asked questions need an answer urgently. There would not be another more convenient venue to get information across.

OBGYN.net: Why did you get involved with the Internet?

Dr. Woo: That was purely from personal interests with computing to start with. Because of my interest and knowledge in desktop computing I have been getting calls everyday from my own colleagues for all sorts of problems concerning hardware and software. I have often had to travel to the colleague's home to fix their computer's ailments and get their software running. Then there came the Internet. It was natural for me to get on board as quickly as I can. And to help people get on it as well. That was in 1994 when the local service providers were shabby, disorganized and very slow. And getting a TCP/IP connection working was already a chore. But like everything else in Hong Kong things moved on so rapidly and we've now got some of the best providers in the world.

OBGYN.net: How long have you been using the Internet?

Dr. Woo: About 3 years now.

OBGYN.net: Please tell us about the development of the Fetal Ultrasound Web Site.

Dr. Woo: It really started from scratch as an auxillary page to my personal homepage. I have very quickly found that it is so much more meaningful to concentrate my efforts in this area so that a lot of concerned people will have access to information which in fact they have great difficulty of accessing. So there was really a great amount of work that followed, searching for relevant links to the text and developing and writing original materials with the aim of making the site a thoroughly comprehensive guide to ultrasound in Pregnancy. I have tried painstakingly to include everything, spanning from history to recent advances. Throughout the pages I have tried to speak in medical terms instead of the more layman terms as it is my believe that this is one way of raising standards in health education in the community.

OBGYN.net: What has been your greatest reward in using the Internet?

Dr. Woo: Getting information for my lectures and a lot of things that I would otherwise not know where to find. And of course people's appreciation of the website.

OBGYN.net: What is the future for the Ob/Gyn community on the Internet- what do you believe is possible?

Dr. Woo: Many colleagues have talked about this, online-books and journals, interactive CME, teleconferencing, congresses on the Internet etc. These are all possible I'm sure and things will improve dramatically with the development of faster technology and the speed of data transmission. But I think the most important thing in the future is very basic, that is to have every Ob-Gyn using the internet, and using it regularly. That will make everybody's efforts so much more worthwhile and further advancement will be so much more rapid. You will see things that you cannot even think of today. If there has not been the fact that cars are such common things, we would not have seen so many roads and so many fantastic automobiles being built.

Joseph Woo, MD, MBBS, FRCOG (Eng), FHKAM
OBGYN.net International Representative - Hong Kong
Joseph.Woo@obgyn.net
Dr. Woo's Obstetric Ultrasound Site

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