About us

Health On the Net Foundation's origins go back to 7-8 September 1995 when some of the world's foremost experts on telemedicine gathered in Geneva, Switzerland, for a conference entitled The Use of the Internet and World-Wide Web for Telematics in Healthcare [1].

The 60 participants came from 11 countries [2]. They included U.S. heart surgeon Dr Michael DeBakey [3], physicians and professors, researchers and senior representatives of the World Health Organisation (WHO) [4], International Telecommunication Union (ITU) [5], the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) [6], the European Commission [7], the National Library of Medicine [8] and the G7-Global Healthcare Applications Project [9].

As the conference wound up, they unanimously voted to create a permanent body that would, in the words of the programme, "promote the effective and reliable use of the new technologies for telemedicine in healthcare around the world." HON's site went live about six months later. On 20 March 1996 www.hon.ch  became one of the very first URLs to guide both lay users as well as medical professionals to reliable sources of healthcare information in cyberspace.

HON today
In the meantime HON has become one of most respected non-profit portals to medical information on the Internet. We are a Swiss foundation, operating out of Geneva with the generous support of Geneva local authorities [10]. Embedded in one of the liveliest, most innovative international centres for R&D in medical informatics and life sciences, HON co-operates closely with the University Hospitals of Geneva [11] and the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics [12] . Our distinguished Council members [13] and Webteam [14] hail from several European countries and the USA.

In 2006, HON extended its international presence through a collaboration with the SA Medical Research Council [18] to promote the HONcode©, review African health and medical Web sites in English-spreaking countries, and provide education to Web developers and Internet consumers about the HONcode©.

Among HON's distinguishing features are two widely-used medical search tools, MedHunt© [16] and HONselect© [17], and the HON Code of Conduct [15] (HONcode©) for the provision of authoritative, trustworthy Web-based medical information.

1. The Use of the Internet and World-Wide Web for Telematics in Healthcare: http://www.hon.ch/cgi-bin/about Invited participants: http://www.hon.ch/Conf/Info/participants.html Dr Michael DeBakey: http://www.hon.ch/Library/papers/debakey.html World Health Organisation: http://www.who.int/ European Laboratory for Particle Physics International Telecommunication Union:http://www.itu.int/ European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN): http://www.cern.ch/Public/European Commission: http://europa.eu.int/comm/dg13/National Library of Medicine: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/G7-Global Healthcare Applications Project: http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/SSG/in02287e.htmlDépartement de l'action sociale et de la santé (DASS): http://www.geneve.ch/dass/ University Hospitals of Geneva: http://www.hug-ge.ch/Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics: http://www.isb-sib.ch/Council members: http://www.hon.ch/Global/HON_organisation.htmlWebteam: http://www.hon.ch/Global/HONTeamPhoto.htmlHONcode©: http://www.hon.ch/HONcode/ MedHunt©: http://www.hon.ch/MedHunt/
2. HONselect©: http://www.hon.ch/HONselect/
3. SA MRC: http://www.mrc.ac.za/