Health On the Net Foundation`s origins go back to September 7-8, 1995, when some of the world`s foremost experts on telemedicine gathered in Geneva, Switzerland, for a conference entitled The Use of the Internet and World-Wide Web for Telematics in Healthcare [1].

The 60 participants came from 11 countries [2]. They included U.S. heart surgeon Dr Michael DeBakey [3], physicians and professors, researchers and senior representatives of the World Health Organisation (WHO) [4], International Telecommunication Union (ITU) [5], the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) [6], the European Commission [7], the National Library of Medicine [8] and the G7-Global Healthcare Applications Project [9].