Web Médica Acreditada Guidelines: Reliability and Quality of Health Information on Spanish-Language Websites Miquel Angel Mayer, Angela Leis, Ramón Sarrias, Pau Ruíz Medical Association of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain Abstract The number of websites providing health information and services on the Internet increases day by day. The quality of these websites is very variable and difficult to assess. There are many self-regulatory initiatives in the English-speaking world to develop quality and ethical standards for health information on the Internet, but few similar Spanish-language initiatives have emerged whilst some studies suggest that quality standards are lower in the Spanish-language sites. A Spanish initiative to improve the quality of these websites would, therefore, seem to be a very important initiative. In Spain, Web Médica Acreditada (WMA) is an initiative to develop quality and ethical standards for health information. The aim of these standards is to improve websites providing such health related-content and services. In this article we present the WMA Guidelines and explain how WMA applies its quality criteria. Quality of Internet health information is essential because it has the potential to benefit or harm a large number of people and it is therefore essential to provide consumers with some tools to aid them in assessing the nature of the information they are accessing and how they should use it without jeopardizing their relationship with their doctor. Keywords: Internet standards; Health care quality; Ethics; Quality assurance; Guidelines; Spanish 1. Introduction The number of websites providing health information and services on the Internet increases constantly, from day to day. It is known that the quality of these websites is very variable and difficult to assess; we can find websites established by government institutions, consumer and scientific organizations, patients’ associations, personal webs, health provider institutions, commercial sites, etc. On the other hand, patients continue to look for new ways of accessing health information and their physicians [1, 2] and more than four in ten health seekers say the material they find affects their decisions about their own health [3]. Thus the choice of appropriate evaluation criteria for the information is both crucial and challenging. There is no consensus, however, on how to resolve this problem. Some Codes of Conduct around the world seek to establish standards of quality in the accreditation of health-related web contents. [4-12]. There are many self-regulatory initiatives in the English-speaking world to develop quality and ethical standards for health information on the Internet, but there is little knowledge about Spanish-speaking initiatives. More Connecting Medical Informatics and Bio-Informatics R. Engelbrecht et al. (Eds.) ENMI, 2005 1287 Section 11: Online Health Information & Patient Empowerment