Certification of health-related websites in France

The 2004 statute that created the French National Authority for Health (HAS, Haute Autorité de Santé) required it to establish a procedure for the certification of health-related web sites. The HAS established a procedure based on the HONcode certification scheme set up by the Health On the Net Foundation, with which HAS has a partnership agreement. The HONcode includes eight principles that govern the quality of online heath information and its presentation (quality of the production process). The collaboration between HAS and HON has already led to improvements in a large number of web sites in France and to their certification. The main advantages of certification for site publishers are better site quality and enhanced credibility rather than a larger audience. Quality certification has little impact on the choice of site by Internet users as they tend to use search engines to find health-related information. Future development of the procedure should work to increase the value of certification both by improving the quality of sites and in signaling quality to Internet users.