National Network of Libraries of Medicine
nnlm.gov
Archives
This page was archived on: May 02, 2008 | View page metadata
Document content is not current. Links may be broken.
| National Network of Libraries of Medicinennlm.gov |
Archives |
|
This page was archived on: May 02, 2008 | View page metadata | Document content is not current. Links may be broken. |
||
 |
| NN/LM PNR National Network of Libraries of Medicine Pacific Northwest Region |
Home | About Us | Search |
 |
Dragonfly
Summer 2003 -- Volume 34, Number 3 |
by Michele Spatz, M.S., Director
Planetree Health Resource Center
Michele Spatz, Director of the Planetree Health Resource Center in The Dalles, Oregon, is the Medical Library Association's (MLA) representative to the URAC Health Web Site Review Committee. Michele, who also serves as Chair of MLA's CAPHIS Web Site committee, was appointed last July.
Founded in 1990, URAC is a non-profit organization dedicated to the accreditation of health and managed care organizations. Currently, it offers over 16 accreditation programs, crossing a broad range of health care services. In 2001, URAC launched its health web site accreditation program.
URAC's accreditation process, which holds sites to 53 rigorous standards of consumer protection, often serves as the framework around which healthcare Web Sites and service providers structure their internal operations to ensure quality outcomes for consumers. URAC's Health Web Site accreditation provides a third-party verification mechanism for compliance, ensuring a site will maintain its quality services and consumer privacy and protection infrastructure over time.
In addition to several managed health plan Web Sites, some well-known URAC accredited sites include MedlinePlus, WebMD, and KidsHealth.
I am the first librarian to serve on the committee and to join leaders from across the health care industry, such as WebMD, Kaiser Permanente, the Health Insurance Association of America and the European Commission Information Society Directorate General. The group meets monthly via conference call to review and discuss accreditation applications. In the year since I have been on the committee, approximately 25 web sites were accredited.
The URAC Health Web Site committee met in Santa Fe, New Mexico in February 2003 to critique and redraft the current accreditation standards. I co-chaired a session with Lois Ambash, of the Internet Healthcare Coalition, on strengthening URAC's outreach to educate end-users about the importance of a health web site's quality criteria and attention to privacy issues.
Currently, URAC is partnering with Consumers' Union Consumer Webwatch and, through a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and additional support from the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, DHHS, is hosting two search engine summits. The bi-coastal summits are designed to explore how users approach and perform Internet searches for health information and how users might be educated to look for quality e-health information. I recently attended the San Francisco summit, which pulled together industry stakeholders. The summit attendees explored the possibility of enhancing search engine mechanics to direct users to quality health web sites and discussed ways of influencing user behavior to improve the quality of their health information retrieval. During the meeting, the role of health sciences librarians as critical to improved health information retrieval for consumers was expressed by many stakeholders. I am confident the agenda developed from the summits will include an important role for health sciences librarians.
Dragonfly, Summer 2003- Volume 34 Number 3
(posted on PNRNews on July 8, 2003)
This publication is funded in whole with Federal funds from the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, under Contract No. N01-LM-1-3516.
NLM | MedlinePlus | PubMed | NLM Gateway | TOXNET | LOCATORplus
NN/LM | UW HSL | NN/LM PNR | Contact us: nnlm@u.washington.edu | Revised: July 8, 2003