Web4health tries to offer accurate information according to up-to-date standards of high quality medical/psychological patient information on the Internet. However, no computer software can or should replace the direct counselling of a human doctor and/or psychotherapist. We hope, that our project will help to promote a better patient information and good relationship between patients and experts.

We are aware of several attempts to define standards of good medical information. A rather general description is the

Web4Health Code of Ethics:

• Transparency and Honesty
  We will provide information about the identity and contact for feedback or questions to the persons responsible for our project. Transparency of purposes and objective of the site as well as any commercial interests and funding will be offered.
  


• Authority
  The sources and information about the medical experts and institutions and sources of our information will help the user of our web page to find reliable medical and psychological information in the area of mental health. In some cases, the source is the clinical experience of the Web4Health expert who wrote the answer.
  
  
• Privacy
  Privacy, security and confidentiality are the most important issues in the development and maintenance of our web page concept. We implement all necessary preparation to protect personal data against any misuse. More.
  


• Currency
  We will have regular updates of our web page, using our groupware. We expect daily updates or feedback to offer up-to-date information.
  


• Accountability
  Quality issues will be of highest relevance for the content development of our project. The editorial policy of content development will be clearly stated and only selected authors with medical and psychotherapeutic clinical experience will participate in the project. Our groupware concept offers special opportunities for user feedback and interaction with the experts (Ask-the-expert-areas, forum, chats).
  
  
• Accessibility
  We try to provide easy access and user friendly content with good readability features. Special care will be taken to have open access for handicapped persons.

During the preparation of our project Web4Health we made special efforts to meet the highest quality criteria for health related websites. We are aware of different approaches to define quality issues of medical web content, e g: MEDCIRCLE criteria of the Safer Internet Action Plan of the EU http://www.medcircle.org or the standard QMIC Quality in Medical Information and Communication http://www.health.tno.nl/en/news/qmic_uk.pdf . We will also meet the standards of the HON Health On the Net Foundation http://www.hon.ch . This also includes tools for the user to define high quality medical WebPages like DISCERN http://www.discern.org.uk . We will evaluate these aspects in the course of our project. Feel free to report any problems or your own evaluation according to the DISCERN criteria http://www.discern.org.uk and send it to us:

Our present coverage of MEDCIRCLE criteria can be read in our content plan (PDF file) Content plan and Medcircle Criteria of Web4health

We comply with the HONcode standard for trustworthy health information: verify here.