History and Accreditations

History

Oncologist Dr Andrew Dean, discovered his patients had a real need for information on cancer. At times of great stress when people have been devastated by bad news of cancer or a life threatening disease, information retention is at its poorest. Often the patient will walk out of the doctor’s room feeling confused and uninformed.

Dr Dean decided to create an intranet site about cancer at his hospital for patients to use. He soon had people from other hospitals asking him for access to the information.

That’s when Dr Dean decided to team up with Pearl Farmer and International Businessman Mr Wayne Hughes to make the information on cancer available to everyone on the World Wide Web and www.virtualcancercentre.com was born.

Dr Andrew Dean

Wayne Hughes

Virtual Cancer Centre.com went live in August 2001 and got 20,000 hits in the first month. Specialists from other medical areas asked for an equivalent information resource in their areas of expertise. The Virtual Cancer Centre evolved into Virtual Medical Centre. There are currently 25 disease areas getting an average of almost 90 million hits per month.

VMC History

Accreditations

		Virtual Medical Centre is accredited by the Geneva Switzerland HON International Ethics Code delivering our organisation the highest level of transparency and ethical standards available on the internet today.

		Virtual Medical Centre is an approved information partner for the Australian government health information websites: HealthDirect, Pregnancy Birth and Baby and mindhealthconnect.

Affiliations

		Virtual Medical Centre is proud to be an Associated Partner of the Standardised Language Certificate for Medical Purposes (sTANDEM) project. The sTANDEM project is intended to assess, promote and certify the command of professional English among health care professionals worldwide but predominantly in Europe. By invitation, myVMC provides content for use in the sTANDEM exams.

		Virtual Medical Centre and its employees support the Folding@home distributed computing project initiated by the Pande lab at Stanford University. We run their software which contributes to their goal of understanding protein folding, misfolding and related diseases. For more information, see http://folding.stanford.edu/.

Awards

		Virtual Medical Centre received the No. 1 Website in the Hitwise Top 10 Website Award in recognition of outstanding performance. Hitwise is the industry standard which measures popularity according to the market share of user visits a website receives compared to other websites in their industry.

		Online Winner in the 18th WAITTA AWARDS 2008. The WAITTA awards recognise outstanding performance and contributions by members of the IT and technology community in Western Australia.

		National Library of Australia. PANDORA (Preserving and Accessing Networked Documentary Resources of Australia) is an archive of Australian online publications that the National Library of Australia considers are of significance. Virtual Medical Centre was selected for preservation by the National Library of Australia.

		Finalist in the Secrets of Australian IT Innovation Awards 2005.www.virtualnursingeducation.com provides professional development for nurses. Virtual Nursing Education has become a finalist in the Austrade Secrets of IT Innovation 2005.

		Finalist in the Secrets of Australian IT Innovation Awards 2004. My Quest (Online Medical Health Records) has become a finalist in the Austrade Secrets of IT Innovation 2004

		Finalist and Winner of the Prime Minister’s Award for Excellence in Community Business Partnerships for Western Australia 2004. Australian State and Territory Award Winner. Australian Prime Minister’s awards for excellence in community business partnerships 2004.