Some say the flood of information is nothing to fear.
"There is so much out there that people can read and understand, and hopefully this will better equip elders and their families to understand their conditions and know what treatment options are out there," says James Fanale, MD, president of the American Geriatrics Society. "As long as this knowledge is used in a proper manner, that's a good thing."
Others shudder at the prospect of rampant self-analysis and presumption. In such circumstances, Lutz says, physicians may need to fight fire with fire.
"A lot of doctors will choose to put up their own Web pages, saying in effect: Here is the content I want you to click on and download, rather than coming into me with hundreds of pages from who knows where," she says.
In addition to putting some control back in physicians' hands, a Web page can save a physician from repeating routine information all day long.
Technology is only a piece of the "empowerment" puzzle, however. There are strong indications that aging baby boomers will not only be better informed about medical topics, but also more demanding of their medical-care providers.
"The post-war baby boomers, who have been an egocentric and demanding group at each stage of their lives, are now becoming the key healthcare consumers, purchasing care for their own aging bodies, as well as for their frail parents," PriceWaterhouseCoopers notes in its "HealthCast 2010" report, which discusses the future trends of healthcare policy makers.
As such, "they are incredibly fickle," says Mary Cain, director of Healthcare Horizons at the Institute for the Future. "They will change [their] physicians because of customer service issues, because of lack of control over their own treatment process. In a world of excess capacity of physicians, this means physicians will have to market their customer service in ways they never have in the past."
It's not a prospect that delights physicians, and yet Cain and others insist that changes in compensation mechanisms are going to make that kind of salesmanship a must.
"Third-party payments have always protected physicians [from the whims of consumers] in the past, and all that is getting blown wide open," says Cain. Employers are getting out of the healthcare business, handing the money and the control directly to workers, "and as it becomes much more consumer-driven, it becomes much less rational."
Under these circumstances, "[healthcare] will have to become much more of a service industry," she says.
This may mean weekend office hours, e-mail consultations, and a general willingness to stop talking and start listening.
"We call it 'popping the God bubble,'" says Cain, referring to the long-standing model in which patients have viewed their physician as the supreme — and often inviolable — source of medical information.
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Dean of the University of Texas at Houston Medical School, Dr. Maximilian Buja is anticipating this change. Today's curriculum, he says, prepares a medical student "to be a partner with the patient in crafting a diagnosis and a treatment plan, as opposed to the more traditional notion of the physician being the all-knowing and omniscient, god-like figure."
