A preliminary study to assess a French code of ethics for health teaching resources on the Internet

Constant assessment of the quality of health information on the Internet is an absolute necessity as peer review is often lacking in this media.

To develop a simple and easy French Code of Ethics, which will enable medical students to judge quality of health information in teaching material available on the Internet.

Three medical informaticians selected ten criteria from previously established codes of ethics from Europe and the USA. This instrument was tested on a sample of 30 health Internet teaching resources.

For the panel of experts, chance corrected inter-observer agreement (kappa) for quality rating ranged from k = -0.19 and k = 0.33, demonstrating poor agreement among the raters.

If negative results of this preliminary study are confirmed by further research, this finding may detrimentally affect projects in Europe to accredit or certify Internet health resources.