> In this issue...

Health on the Net Foundation is seeing itself undergo several major developments, escalating its level in the domain of health and medical informatics. This special issue of the newsletter provides us with the details of all the new exciting activities and engagements of the Foundation.

• HON gains official ISO liaison status
• HON launches new certificate
• HON is conducting a study on Internet use for health/medical purposes
• HON conducts HONcode satisfaction study
• HON is now on Facebook and Twitter

Geneva, Switzerland – 15 June 2010 – The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) today granted Health on the Net Foundation (HON) the status Category A Liaison to the Health Informatics Technical Committee (ISO/TC 215).
Read the press release

While the new certificate still retains the same features of the original one – basic information about the web site, the date of certification, initial and recent review dates – it now highlights a new characteristic that is unique to each web site. Following careful manual evaluation by the HON Evaluation Team, the new certificate displays indications used in the evaluation, pointing to sample extracts from the web site that show how it follows the HONcode. The new certificate is an initiative to enhance further the HONcode certification system, and to encourage further health and medical information seekers to be more critical when searching through the Internet. It is also intended to advance the ethical use and promotion of health and medical data among online information providers. The HONcode is the most widely-accepted reference for online health and medical publishers. Currently, the HONcode is used by over 7,200 certified web sites, covering 102 countries. Read the press release

From July 1-31, HON is inviting individuals and medical professionals to take part in its Summer 2010 survey, which focuses on how the Internet is being used for health and medical purposes. It includes questions on how one typically searches the Internet for disease information, how one places importance on various health website characteristics, and how one typically behaves when faced with situations involving the Internet and health information.
The survey at: http://www.hon.ch/Survey2010/

As webmasters you can help us to promote this survey on your website for one month. To do so please add this HTML code to your website: <a href="http://www.hon.ch/Survey2010/"><img src="http://debussy.hon.ch/Survey/Survey2010/survey-logo1.jpg" alt="Survey 2010" width="160" height="100" border="1" /></a>

HON is conducting a survey exploring how satisfied web masters are one month after placing the HONcode certificate on their web sites.

The survey began on 23 July 2008, and as of 14 June 2010, 2,209 web masters of web sites have been invited to participate. 822 have responded. Web masters of sites using the English, French, and Spanish (from March 2010) languages were invited in the study.

Read the full press release.

The questions and the results can be found on this link: http://www.hon.ch/Dossier/Webmasters/Results.html (general survey results).

Facebook

To further promote and communicate the goals of our organization in the online community, we have created a Facebook fan page and a Twitter account for HON. If you have accounts on these platforms, we would like to invite you to become fans of the Facebook page, and to follow HON on Twitter. If you have friends who are familiar with HON, kindly invite them to become fans/followers as well.

Twitter