Health On The Net Foundation

HON today

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 [1].

The 60 participants came from 11 countries [2]. They included U.S. heart surgeon Dr Michael DeBakey [3], physicians and professors, researchers and senior representatives of the World Health Organisation (WHO) [4], International Telecommunication Union (ITU) [5], the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) [6], the European Commission [7], the National Library of Medicine [8] and the G7-Global Healthcare Applications Project [9].

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. We are a Swiss foundation, operating out of Geneva with the generous support of local Geneva authorities [10].

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 [11] and the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics [12] . Our distinguished Council members [13] and Webteam [14] hail from several European countries and the U.S.A.

Among HON's distinguishing features are two widely-used medical search tools, MedHunt© [16] and HONselect© [17], and the HON Code of Conduct [15] (HONcode©) for the provision of authoritative, trustworthy Web-based medical information.

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