Press Release: European Commission recommends quality criteria for health websites

The European Commission adopted a Communication on 9 December 2002 setting out a core set of Quality Criteria for Health Related Websites. It outlines 6 quality criteria: transparency and honesty, authority, privacy and data protection, updating of information, accountability and accessibility. The Communication states the need to tailor these criteria according to particular audiences and describes the methods of implementing quality criteria including codes of conduct, self applied codes or quality labels, user guidance tools, filtering tools, and third party quality and accreditation systems.