GIN AUSTRIA. Assuring quality and relevance on Internet-health-informations for patients

GIN AUSTRIA (Gesundheitsinformationsnetz AUSTRIA) offers patients and consumers reliable medical knowledge about diseases, wellness and disease management in an understandable way and enables them to quick and incessant access to informations about the Austrian health system and Austrian health organizations. To improve the quality of the database and to achieve full customer (patients, citizens) satisfaction a systematic approach for implementing total quality management is also applied. Focusing the attention on understanding and responding to customer needs, systematic and continuous improving of the IS and total involvement of all participants are the three core TQM principles at this project. The second focus of the project is the development and the implementation (prototype) of a medical dictionary or rather medical thesaurus as interface for patients, who are not used to scientific terms and expressions. This interface is based on the controlled vocabulary of the MeSH-Thesaurus (german version).