HON Wins eEurope Award for eHealth

Health On the Net Foundation (HON) has been named as winner of the eEurope Award for eHealth 2004, in the category “eHealth Information tools and services for citizens.” Over 100 submissions were received for the award. The HON submission focused on online information quality, addressing the fundamental issue of standards for the presentation of health information.

Health On the Net Foundation (HON) has been named as winner of the eEurope Award for eHealth 2004, in the category “eHealth Information tools and services for citizens.” Over 100 submissions were received for the award. The HON submission focused on online information quality, addressing the fundamental issue of standards for the presentation of health information.HON online tools for citizens include the HONcode accreditation system for online information quality, HONselect directory and MedHunt search engine containing resources for over 30,000 health and medical subjects, and WRAPIN: HON’s next-generation search application to guide consumers to trustworthy sources, analyzing online medical content to help lay users deal with the ever-increasing number of health-related web pages.Health On the Net Foundation’s origins go back to September 7-8, 1995, when some of the world’s foremost experts on telemedicine gathered in Geneva, Switzerland, for a conference entitled The Use of the Internet and World-Wide Web for Telematics in HealthcareThe 60 participants came from 11 countries. As the conference wound up, they unanimously voted to create a permanent body that would, in the words of the programme, “promote the effective and reliable use of the new technologies for telemedicine in healthcare around the world.” HON’s site went live some six months later. On March 20, 1996, www.hon.ch became one of the very first URLs to guide both lay users and medical professionals to reliable sources of healthcare information in cyberspace.HON in the meantime has become one of most respected not-for-profit portals to medical information on the Internet. Virtual Cancer Centre and Virtual Medical Centre are proud to be an accredited member of the HON online health resources.