Dear Ms. Heath:
I read with interest your recent listserv post on the upcoming Consumer Health
Care Information on the Internet workshop being offered by the British Library.
Your workshops on medical information on the Internet, databases, searching for
health information, and consumer health, will be very beneficial to your
audience. May I suggest that you include healthfinder.gov, the official Federal
gateway Web site for consumer health information, offered by U.S. Department
of Health and Human Service, which presents some of the best consumer resources
available world wide.
More than 400 government Web sites with health information are seamlessly
brought together under this one site, as well as thousands of resources from our
non-profit, State and university partners over 5,000 resources in all, on over
1000 topics. This Spring, the Surgeon General released the newest features on
healthfinder - a section on alternative medicine, "Just For You Men's Health,"
and resources for Spanish speakers. In June, the U. S. Federal Trade Commission
promoted the site as the most reliable resource for consumers at risk for
Internet health scams.
healthfinder has received 38 national awards and scored 6 million visits and 75
million hits since it began over two years ago, and currently serves over
400,000 visitors each month. We encourage organizations to draw fully on the
well maintained resources of healthfinder not only by the linking to our home
page but by linking directly to any or all of our 1000 key word searches. This
provides a foundation for a full consumer health web site at no cost.
Instructions may be found at the 'about us' linking section on the home page.
We would appreciate your alerting the British Library workshop attendees to
healthfinder.gov; I believe they would be appreciative too. In this age of
global information, everyone can benefit from resources in other countries. For
further information on healthfinder.gov, please go to www.healthfinder.gov or
feel free to contact me, E-mail: [log in to unmask], phone: (202)
260-2652, fax: (202) 205-0463, mailing address: Office of Disease Prevention and
Health Promotion, U.S. DHHS, 200 Independence Avenue, S.W., Room 738 G,
Washington, DC 20201.
Sincerely,
Mary Jo Deering, Ph.D.
Director, Health Communication and Telehealth
Chair, healthfinder Steering Committee
Lead HHS Staff, Work Group on a National Health
Information Infrastructure
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