Safety and security on the Internet: challenges and advances in Member States

    The World Health Organization (WHO) Global Observatory for eHealth (GOe) has just released the fourth volume of its eHealth series, “Safety and security on the Internet: Challenges and advances in Member States“.

I was glad to have helped serve as a lead author for this edition and was similarly happy to see the reviewers listed in the volume had representation from the international pharmacy world.

This eHealth series volume explored survey results from over 100 participating countries. Data in the publication were originally collected as part of the second global survey on eHealth by WHO. This fourth volume of the GOe eHealth series was focused on four major areas:

*Internet pharmacy
*Online health information seeking and quality
*Digital literacy
*Internet safety and security

Notably, the process of legally purchasing medications online still lacks a global consensus, as most (66%) countries still do not have any legislation in place that specifies if Internet pharmacy operations are either allowed or prohibited.

The 86-page report fully characterizes the findings from these outlined domains. It also includes case studies that illustrate the advances and challenges in these arenas such as the Verified Internet Pharmacy Practice Sites (USA & Canada) for Internet pharmacies and the Health On the Net Foundation (Switzerland) and PeRRSonalized Medicine (Hungary) for online health information quality.

A free, full-text PDF of the WHO report can be accessed here.

@kevinclauson