Health On the Net Foundation

The Health On the Net Foundation ( HON ) is a foundation founded in 1995, headquartered in Switzerland. The Foundation was awarded by the United Nations Economic and Social Council of the NGO status on 23 July 2002.

The creation of the Foundation was one of the results of the international conference " International Working Conference on the Use of Internet and World - Wide Web for Telematics in Health Care", in Geneva ( Switzerland ) took place in September 1995. Participants from the German side were Helmut Duwe from the DLR Institute of Aviation and Space Medicine, Cologne, Dietrich Kaiser, DIMDI, Cologne and Thomas Knogge, University of Bielefeld.

Since 20 March 1996 the HON Foundation with the stated aim to make trusted sources of information in the field of health care for all their internet, online.

The Foundation's mission is to help lay people and medical professionals to find useful and reliable medical information on the Internet. HON has the so-called " HON Code of Conduct " (short: HON, see below) worked out on the basis of information on the WWW according to formal criteria in terms of their reliability and credibility can be certified. HON also offers a search engine that will help specifically for HON certified sources can be searched on the WWW.

HONcode

The ' HONcodeist a certificate for medical and health websites of the Foundation. Among other things, the content must be truthful, the doctor -patient relationship must not interfere and protect the confidentiality of individual data.

For the award of the certificate contents by the HON Foundation on the compliance with the prescribed formal criteria both at initial certification, as well as the following are checked at regular intervals. The use of the certificate is free and the certification of a web page can in turn be checked on the website of the HON Foundation.

The principles of the HON are:

Criticism

HONcode as a quality indicator for medical and health Web sites is also increasingly used for the certification of websites, which are based on economic interests. A distinction of health information that is created by non-profit or for-profit providers is not yet given.