15. January 2018 / Uwe Schwenk, Timo Thranberend, Marion Grote Westrick
Increasingly, the internet is the place to go to for health information. One in 20 searches on Google is related to health. More than half of German internet users look for information online about illnesses and treatments at least once a year. However, if the common assumption is to be believed, they usually fail to find what they are looking for in the jungle of information and succeed only in becoming needlessly confused. Or they are confronted with factually inaccurate or misleading information. One proposed solution to this problem is the establishment of a National Health Portal. The German Federal Ministry of Health (BMG) has commissioned the Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) to develop a concept for such a portal by the beginning of 2018. Does this idea hold up to scrutiny? Because we would like to offer both constructive and critical input to the German government’s efforts, and after frequent requests for our own opinion in past months, this blog post gathers together our current thoughts on a National Health Portal –in ten theses.
