How can patients and their relatives find reliable and informative information online about illnesses and symptoms? And how can they use trusted channels to find the right specialists who focus specifically on the relevant field? To ensure a high level of reliability in the complex online market, the Aktionsforum Gesundheitsinformation has developed its own quality seal. The Leading Medicine Guide has now been awarded this seal – and comprehensively certified. A mark of quality. And proof that the medical market has become more transparent thanks to the online portal.
From the very beginning, this has been one of the Leading Medicine Guide’s key objectives: our medical sector must become more transparent! Consequently, the high quality criteria were self-evident: all content offered must be created and published in an objective, factual, ad-free and independent manner. The focus is clearly and recognisably on factually correct and up-to-date information.
The Aktionsforum Gesundheitsinformation e.V. – afgis for short – has also set itself the goal of making the market more transparent and making it easier to identify providers who stand for trustworthiness and reliability – and of giving people the opportunity to better assess offers and information. It was therefore only a matter of time before these two active market improvers came together.
Clear goal: greater transparency in the online market
“We set out to enable people to find the right specialists for their symptoms and conditions without great effort, cost or hurdles.” So reads the online portal Leading Medicine Guide’s self-description on its website, which is well worth a read and also offers an interesting historical overview. With its relaunch in autumn 2019, the specialist portal took a huge step toward this goal, as the results of visibility analyzes also show. Leading Medicine Guide is certainly on the right track. In fact, it has never been as easy as it is today to find the right specialist for a condition online, quickly and with a high degree of certainty.
Leading Medicine Guide: High-quality health information
As the first online platform of its kind, Leading Medicine Guide has, from the very beginning, placed the utmost importance on addressing the sensitive topic of health information on the internet with the greatest possible care.
This has now been confirmed by the afgis network: the award recognizes a health website that provides “high-quality health information”, as afgis puts it. For the independent network, it is important to separate the wheat from the chaff: after all, there are “numerous dubious websites that disguise product advertising as health information or spread misinformation.”
To provide reliable guidance here, particularly for potential patients, afgis developed its own assessment procedure. The network evaluated the online portal against a total of ten transparency criteria. The thorough investigation focused on transparency, the naming of authors and editors, the opportunity for user feedback, and the reliability of the information sources. Internal quality assurance procedures and the clear separation of advertising from editorial content were also very important to afgis. As there is absolutely no advertising on Leading Medicine Guide, this point was naturally dealt with quickly. Incidentally, strict compliance with data protection guidelines was also part of the assessment.
From now on, as a certified provider of reliable health information, the Leading Medicine Guide is authorized to use the network’s quality logo, which serves as a seal of approval. This allows users to recognize even more quickly what they can expect from the specialist portal.
Incidentally, the Health Information Action Forum was launched in 1999 by the Federal Ministry of Health as an alliance of companies, organizations and associations. The network has existed as a registered association since 2003.
