NewsGuard Launches HealthGuard, a New Tool to Protect Against Online Health Care Hoaxes
Hospital systems, health insurers, and doctors’ offices can license HealthGuard ratings, Nutrition Labels, and other health literacy resources for their patients and customers to inoculate them against healthcare misinformation.
(June 2, 2020—New York City) Declaring that “The internet is not your doctor,” NewsGuard, a company that deploys journalists to issue trust ratings for thousands of news and information websites across the U.S. and Europe, today announced that it has launched a new service aimed at protecting people from health care myths related to vaccines, cancer, COVID-19, and more. HealthGuard specifically targets news and information websites that cover health care issues – including sites that publish reliable health information, as well as those that spread dangerous misinformation on these topics.
HealthGuard is designed to be licensed by hospital systems, health insurers, doctors’ offices, and others interested in providing patients and their families, as well as other stakeholders, with ratings of the reliability of online sources. In addition, these healthcare provider licensees will be able to share HealthGuard’s media-literacy resources, including flyers highlighting the top 12 healthcare myths and the top 13 COVID-19 myths, tips for using search engines knowledgeably to find reliable health expertise, videos on how to evaluate the reliability of health care websites, and educational quizzes explaining the difference between viable treatments and bogus claims.
