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Jen-Ai Hospital Websites are in Compliance
with the HONcode (1)
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2003/08/11
BY MARK K. CHAN
TAICHUNG, JEN-AI HOSPITAL - DALI
¡@¡@On July 18, 2003, Jen-Ai
Hospital English Website and
on August 11, 2003, Jen-Ai
Hospital International Patient Center Website
were found to be in compliance with
the Health on the Net Foundation's Code of Conduct (HONcode).
HONcode, created by Health
on the Net Foundation in 1996, addresses one of Internet's
main healthcare issues: the reliability and credibility of medical
and health-related information on the Web.
¡@¡@The Internet has become one of the most widely-used
communication media in the world and with various softwares
available to the public, anyone with some time and effort, can
design a website and present any information on the Web. The
problem is therefore no longer finding the information but assessing
the credibility of the information, as well as the relevance
and accuracy of a document retrieved from the Internet. In some
cases, websites provide no appropriate documentation regarding
the scientific design of a medical study, nor are studies made
available that support the given claims.
¡@¡@The Health On the Net Foundation, a Swiss organization, has
created the 8
Principles in its Code of Conduct to help standardize
the reliability of medical and health information available
on the Web. The HONcode is not an award system, nor does it
intend to rate the quality of the information provided by a
website. It only defines a set of rules to hold website developers
to basic ethical standards in the presentation of the information
and help remind the public to be aware of the source and the
purpose of the data that they are reading.
¡@¡@The HONcode aims to raise the quality of healthcare information
available on the Net. It is a self-regulatory, voluntary certification
system based on an "active seal" concept. While primarily
intended for healthcare site developers and publishers, the
blue-and-red HONcode seal on subscribing sites also helps users
identify sources of reliable information. Among other things,
it addresses the authority of the information provided, data
confidentiality and privacy, proper attribution of sources,
transparency of financial sponsorship and the importance of
clearly separating advertising from editorial content.
¡@¡@Some 3,000 websites are now formal HONcode subscribers, of
which about 80% of these websites are based in the U.S., but
the proportion of European and other non-U.S. sites has been
steadily growing in the past few years. In Taiwan, there were
only 9 websites that once adhered to the HONcode, but only 3
websites are still found to be in compliance. The HONcode now
exists in 26 language versions : Arabic, Catalan, Simplified
Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German,
Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Macedonian,
Malaysian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Spanish,
Swedish, and Turkish. |
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