Dr. Neil Resnick is one geriatrician who believes older adults need to be more pro-active about their medical care.

For that reason, he's helping promote a new Web site created by the Pennsylvania Medical Society, www.myfamilywellness.org, which is designed to increase consumers' ability to evaluate their own health. The older population is a special emphasis of the medical society's Family Health and Wellness program, which was announced last week.

"By knowing more about their own health, patients can play a more active role to assist the doctor better," said Dr. Res-nick, chief of geriatrics at the University of Pittsburgh and head of its Institute on Aging. "The doctor and patient are now capable of being more on the same plane as partners, with each one able to help the other."

The medical society has identified aging, asthma, obesity and mental health as four key issues it wants to address in Pennsylvania through outreach efforts. The Web site has interactive features that help people calculate issues they may have relating to weight, energy expenditure, heart rate and more. By completing on-line questionnaires, people can receive assessments of general health and fitness and risk of diabetes or cardiac problems.

Many younger patients already educate themselves in such areas, and Dr. Resnick encouraged older adults to do so as well, with their sons or daughters helping them, if necessary. Older generations have tended to defer to physicians as knowledgeable authority figures telling them what to do. Now, the more they know about themselves entering the doctor's office, the better the time spent with the physician can become, instead of leaving assessments solely in the doctor's hands.

Too many older adults, Dr. Resnick said, automatically associate their health problems with the aging process, when learning more will help them realize what can be done to treat the problem. Too many also rely on acquaintances or unreliable Internet sources for health advice, he said, so the medical society wanted to provide a factual Web site that patients could use for information.

"It will be more productive if patients come in more know-ledgeable, more empowered, knowing what the key elements are to talk about, with a better idea of disease and decline from disease," Dr. Resnick said. "When the doctor advises this, that or the other, maybe [the patients will] now know what that means."

The geriatrician said it made more sense for adults to leave assessments in the hands of doctors when they were receiving attention for specific, acute illnesses or injuries requiring immediate treatment. Increasingly, patients living longer than in the past have chronic conditions in need of general care. Patients' lifestyles have a major bearing on how they progress through a disease such as diabetes, so it's all the more important for them to show initiative.

"When looking at things like diet, smoking, exercise, willingness to take pills and report symptoms, doctors have no control over that," Dr. Resnick noted. "To the extent that patients understand how important each of those things is, then they can be an integral part of discussions, and the doctor and patient will make a much more feasible solution. Patients will get better care and get healthier, and doctors will get less frustrated, and costs should go down."