Committed to the Open Source Movement in Healthcare
Established
16 October 1998
Copyright
© 1998–2008
Health informatics Europe
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MedCERTAIN - The future European trustmark for reliable health
information
Executive Summary Health information on the Internet, through its popularity and variable quality, provides an ideal testbed domain for the exploration of tools and techniques to support advanced information management such as rating and filtering technologies. MedCERTAIN will establish a fully functional self- and third-party rating system enabling patients and consumers to filter harmful health information and to positively identify and select high quality information. We aim to provide a system allow European citizens to place greater trust in networked information, exemplified in the domain of health information. The project will demonstrate how PICS/RDF/XML-based content rating and filtering technologies can automate and exploit value-adding resource description services. The proposed technology strategy combines a pragmatic use of simple existing technologies for data acquisition with a future-oriented standards policy intended to lead rather than follow the evolution of definitions for information-mediation services. Through longstanding involvement with the medical, Internet cataloguing and Web standardisation communities, the MedCERTAIN consortium can draw upon a broad range of collaborators, past experience and ongoing research. MedCERTAIN - a collaborative system for assessing health information on the web MedCERTAIN is currently pulling together academics, industry, consumers, and professional organisations in order to establish a comprehensive quality management system on the Internet, which includes a network of hot-lines, support for self-regulation, development of technical measures and awareness initiatives. The project follows up from the idea that the quality of health information and interactive applications on the Internet cannot and should not be controlled by a central body or authority, but instead information and applications must be evaluated and be "labelled" in a collaborative, decentralised, distributed manner (1-3). Labelling means to provide meta-information, i.e. to provide information about information, which may be descriptive or evaluative (4). For example, a book review is evaluative meta-information, while the table of contents is descriptive meta-information. Within the medCERTAIN project, a technical and organisational infrastructure is currently being developed, which allows individuals, organisations, associations, societies and other entities to digitally label (rate, evaluate, peer-review, give quality seals to...) online published health information using a standard computer-readable vocabulary (meta-information). The medCERTAIN consortium will also create
different levels of certification for publishers of health information on the
web (reaching from simple quality seals indicating a "good standing"
of the site to "gold" quality seals indicating that the site has been
peer-reviewed externally). Websites who want to get a MedCERTAIN certificaton
will have to commit themselves to the Washington Code of eHealth Ethics (6, 7).
A community of trusted raters (join
us here References
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) will rate
information while they surf the web flagging fraudulent information, or evaluate
(peer-review) information if authors want a "gold" quality seal. (5)