gms | German Medical Science

Background: In 1999 the European Union initiated eEurope with ten main topics, one of them is eHealth. A European citizen with access to the World Wide Web has the theoretical ability to find every health related information needed 24-7-365 (C). The two limitations are how to define the appropriate search term and how to appropriately judge the results produced by search engines - e.g. Google or Bing.

To compare national web based strategies to give the European citizens access to helpful and health relevant data.

Methods and Results: As part of a master thesis project in the field of public health [1] a web-based search for „internet + health information + quality criteria” was performed in Medline and a survey among 246 participants revealed that 92% are not able to recognize e-health information quality criteria. Already in 2005 more than 270 distinct instruments were available to assess the quality of health information in the world-wide-web with a high rate of fluctuation [2].

Conclusions and future perspectives: These quality certificates are a first step to improve consumer security in eHealth related areas. However, it has to be considered that these criteria mainly check only formal related criteria compared to content as e.g. defined in the eight criteria of the HON Code of Conduct [http://www.hon.ch/HONcode/Patients/Conduct.html] for medical and health websites. Due to the large variety of certificates and the poor acknowledgement among the internet-user community an initiative to establish at least European or supranational standards to handle the presentation of eHealth related information on the world-wide-web is necessary.