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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 Healthcare [].
The 60 participants
came from 11 countries []. They
included U.S. heart surgeon Dr Michael DeBakey [],
physicians and professors, researchers and senior representatives
of the World Health Organisation (WHO) [],
International Telecommunication Union (ITU) [],
the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) [],
the European Commission [], the
National Library of Medicine []
and the G7-Global Healthcare Applications Project [].
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,
became
one of the very first URLs to guide both lay users and medical
professionals to reliable sources of healthcare information
in cyberspace.
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HON in the
meantime has become one of most respected not-for-profit portals
to medical information on the Internet. We are a Swiss foundation,
operating out of Geneva with the generous support of local Geneva
authorities [].
Embedded in
one of the liveliest, most innovative international centres
for R&D in medical informatics and life sciences, HON co-operates
closely with the University Hospitals of Geneva []
and the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics []
. Our distinguished Council members []
and Webteam [] hail from several
European countries and the U.S.A.
Among HON's
distinguishing features are two widely-used medical search tools,
MedHunt© [] and HONselect©
[], and the HON Code of Conduct
[] (HONcode©) for the provision
of authoritative, trustworthy Web-based medical information.
©Copyright
HONcode
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