MedlinePlus en español marks its 10th anniversary

 

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National Institutes of Health

MedlinePlus en español Marks its 10^th Anniversary

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MedlinePlus en español (http://medlineplus.gov/espanol) launched in September 2002. MedlinePlus en español is a full-featured web site that contains a wealth of authoritative, reliable consumer-level health information in Spanish from the National Institutes of Health and national health organizations.
Elias A. Zerhouni, MD, then NIH’s director, stated at the time: “A primary part of NIH's mission is to translate medical advances into health information that the public can use. Making MedlinePlus information available in Spanish greatly expands NIH's ability to carry out its mission to communicate with the public.”
MedlinePlus en español includes innovative features in a Spanish-language health information web site:

• The pages are not a literal translation from the English. Instead, they are a true cultural adaptation that engages the U.S. Hispanic audience.
• Although the site mirrors the English MedlinePlus site, it is built to be a completely Spanish environment. The site offers an illustrated medical encyclopedia, tutorials, information on medicines as well as herbs and supplements, daily health news, anatomy and surgery videos and much more information, all in Spanish. Site navigation is also in Spanish.
• The site’s search tool accepts Spanish diacritics and returns only the results from the Spanish content. Nevertheless, the site can be used by English-speaking care providers because users can easily toggle between Spanish and English pages.

Take a look at our evolution:

The site continues to expand and embrace new technologies. A mobile version, launched in 2010, provides reliable health information to mobile users. A Spanish Twitter account, @MedlinePlusEsp, provides MedlinePlus content to a social media audience, and a suite of special data files make MedlinePlus information available to other systems and Web sites.

MedlinePlus en español is frequently among the top 5 on the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) E‑Government Satisfaction Index.
The site has come a long way since it started. As the U.S. Hispanic population has grown, so too has MedlinePlus en español.

	2002	Now
U.S. Hispanic population	37.4 million	52 million
Spanish health topic pages	486	913
Visits to MedlinePlus en español pages	7.9 million (FY03)	94.4 million (FY11)

NLM welcomes your comments and feedback about MedlinePlus en español. Click the Contact Us link at the top of this page to send us a message.