[E-health and Cyberdoc - "health portals" from a professional and quality assurance viewpoint].

As a special expression of e-business in the health service the sphere of e-health has developed in recent years which increasingly manifests itself in the internet via health portals. Next to the transmitting of medical contents, the offer of community functions and the trading with goods from the medical sector, these health portals now increasingly provide advisory services for citizens by medical experts. Even if these services are predominantly effected by physicians, this activity is in agreement with the regulations of the currently valid professional responsibility law for German physicians, as its main emphasis (at the moment) is on health prevention and information. The safeguarding of quality of the online retrievable health information creates a further problem. The different approaches to the safeguarding of the quality of medical contents in the internet do not exempt the user from making a self-responsible decision as to which information he may consider reliable. This is due to the fact that there are no standardised control criteria.