We would like to thank again all the participants who participated in the study in a framework of the EU project KHRESMOI. KHRESMOI aims to develop a multi-lingual and multi-modal search engine for biomedical information and documents addressing the needs of the lay population, medical doctors and radiologists. The study focused on understanding the preferences and needs of general public regarding the use of search engine for health and medical purposes.

Main findings:

• 385 answers were collected, representing mostly the opinions of highly educated users from the healthcare and IT fields. Participants from 42 countries around the world filled the questionnaire, with France and Spain having the most contributors.
• The Internet was reported to be the second source of health information after physicians, due to its accessibility and "easiness" of use.
• The most important characteristics of a search engine are relevance and trustworthiness of results. It seems that the main problem is that results currently retrieved using a general search engine do not satisfy these requirements.
• The ideal representation of the information will be a categorization of the results into different groups. Helpful tools, which are highly appreciated by respondents, are advanced search, medical dictionary/thesaurus, suggested relevant topics, image search, and risk factor tools

>> What to know more? All results are available on our web site!

HON presents three articles. Two are presented as posters and one as an oral presentation. The oral presentation covers the results of Khresmoi survey conducted in March 2011 intended to understand how the members of general public are looking for the health information in the Internet. The posters presents the results of the study showing the impact of the HONcode certification on the web sites and the results of Summer 2010 survey on how Internet users are using the Internet for the health purposes.

Description: The Health On the Net foundation has submitted three articles to this conference. All are accepted as oral presentations. First article presents the results of the study aiming to show the role of the HONcode certification in improving the transparency of the health information found on the Internet. The second study presents the HONcode certification in all its complexity and describes its evolution during last 15 years. The third articles outlines the main findings of Summer 2010 Survey conducted to understand how Internet users are searching for the health information in the Internet.

Description: HON participates in this conference. In the article entitled "Evolution d'internet dans le domaine médical" we compare the results of two surveys on the Internet use for health purposes. Surveys were conducted in 2005 and 2010.