Medicine& Marketing
How to identify reliable healthcare websites
By Dr. Augusto Pimazoni Netto*

The volume of health information available on the Internet is overwhelming, and the search for this information by patients, internet users and physicians has increased.

Due to the increasingly important role of the electronic media in our studying habits, it is absolutely necessary to have some adequate technical guidance so that the Internet user gets to know how to evaluate ethics and the reliability of the information available in sites on healthcare.

The National Institute of Health (NIH), one of the world's foremost medical research centers, created a guiding tutorial called “Evaluating Internet Health Information – A Tutorial from the National Library of Medicine”, a real masterpiece in terms of education, content and objectivity, by detailing and applying a systematic evaluation process to online health information. It includes a checklist of evaluation questions to ask when considering an Internet health information source; this way, reader gets aware of all the care he must take when accessing this kind of site. The NIH tutorial is in written in English, easy to understand, with subtitles in English to improve the understanding process. It is worth accessing this tutorial through the link: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/webeval/webeval_start.html

The tutorial shows practical examples of two fiction sites, both apparently focused on health but, in fact, one of them is a marketing tool that intends to sell therapeuctic drugs while the other site looks like a reliable and ethically correct site.

It is important to say that the tutorial has no restriction in relation to running promotional messages within ethical and reliable sites, if these messages are identified as promotional ones and based on evidences. On the other hand, it also warns the readers about the risk of non-ethical sites that make use of promotional strategies as if they were medical advice to sell their products.

It is worth checking...

Bibliography:
“Evaluating Internet Health Information – A Tutorial from the National Library of Medicine”. U.S. National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health. Available at: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/webeval/webeval_start.html. Access on January 29, 2008.

(*) Dr. Augusto Pimazoni Netto is a physician graduated from USP with specialization in the USA. He is also majored in Business Administration from Fundação Getúlio Vargas (SP). He is 30-year-experienced in the pharmaceutical industry in the Management/Directorate and Marketing departments. He is the Director President of MED MARK Consultoria Médica Empresarial Ltda. Contact: pimazoni@uol.com.br or 55 (11) 5572-4432.