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This article is from the WebMD News Archive

Open Letter: WebMD Responds to Internet Health Studies

By Barry W. Wolcott, MD
WebMD Health News

The March 9, 2002, issue of the British Medical Journal includes three studies addressing the important issue of the quality of health information on the Internet. As is often the case, these studies found both good and bad news. The good news is that they found many improvements in the sites they studied since earlier reports; the bad news is that all is not yet ideal.

A more detailed analysis of the studies can be found in the related links article at the bottom of this letter.

I am writing this open letter because I want our users to know what we do at WebMD every day to deliver high-quality medical information:

We fostered the creation of independent accreditation standards and review of Internet health information sites to go beyond the self-regulation called for in the HON and High Ethics standards, which serve as a code of conduct for Internet health web sites.
Accreditation is an important tool in monitoring quality in many elements of American medicine, including schools of medicine and nursing, hospitals, and nursing homes. We know the importance of providing consumers reliable and independent analysis of health information on the web. Therefore, WebMD deliberately became a leader in the efforts to empower URAC, an independent medical accreditation organization, to accredit health information sites just as other independent bodies accredit medical schools, residency programs, hospitals, and nursing homes. We are extremely proud that URAC has developed such an independent accreditation process and that in the first quarter of 2002, WebMD was in the first group of health information sites to receive accreditation.
We employ only experienced medical writers and then have experienced physicians review their work before it is published to our site.
We review all of our medical content annually and either modify it to ensure it is current or remove it from the site.
When we license medical content, we carefully choose our partners to ensure that they create that medical content in "the same way we do."
We clearly differentiate between health information we independently create or license and product-related information from our sponsors.
We separate our editorial staff from our business staff; our advertisers do not influence what we write.
We routinely solicit feedback from all users, both physician and laypeople, and use that information to modify specific content items.

Everyone I work with here at WebMD Health is committed to providing you with quality health information in a manner that meets your needs. Please let me know if you have concerns or questions about information of any type you find at WebMD Health.