Extending the Internet to Community Hospitals
"There are many unknowns relating to the implementation of networked resources and services in community hospitals," says Neil Rambo, Associate Director of the National Network of Libraries of Medicine, Pacific Northwest Region. " Through this project we are exploring optimal technical, financial, and user models for extending access. We hope this project will be the first phase of an on-going effort to extend network access throughout the region."
The Regional Medical Library, with contract funding from the National Library of Medicine, provides support services throughout a five-state area for regional health sciences librarians and health professionals who are not affiliated with the UW. Typically, health care institutions in the Northwest have no access to the Internet.
The major goal of the project is to introduce network information services to community hospitals through the librarian. "We believe that the librarian is in a potentially powerful position to introduce various groups--medical staff, nursing staff, or administration--to the possibilities of Internet access. We chose places where librarians were doing interesting things in other areas of information technology," says Rambo. "They will be able to introduce Internet resources and services in a way that will make sense and be attractive."
The seven community hospitals in the project are:
Information resulting from the study will be of value to other community hospitals and health sciences libraries considering access to the Internet. "Right now a lot of places are on the verge of this. Librarians are clamoring for ways to get connected, but we have no organized approach to recommend," says Rambo. "This is the first project of its kind focusing on heath sciences connections."
In addition to connecting hospital libraries to the Internet, the project has research and clinical components.
The research component will test an information retrieval system called Anatomy Browser, a network-based approach for getting access to the UW School of Medicine's "Digital Anatomist." This work is being conducted by Dr. James Brinkley and others in the Department of Biological Structure. Through the Internet, a client browser will access an information server running on a NeXT computer at the UW. The project team will analyze network connectivity and routing, and data transfer performance. A local implementation of Anatomy Browser is already in use at the UW where Neuroanatomy students use computers in the Health Sciences Library to access the server via the campus network.
Various windows contain information retrieved by the Anatomy Browser. In this screen, the upper left window is a cross-section through the brain. By pointing to the ventricles in this window, a student can retrieve a 3-D reconstruction of them, which is displayed as a Quicktime movie in the upper right window. The "From Bench to Bedside" project will use the Anatomy Browser, running over the Internet, to analyze connectivity and performance issues.
The objective of the project's clinical component is to link clinicians with information about the sequencing and mapping of human genes. Dr. Roberta Pagon at Children's Hospital and Medical Center is conducting this portion of the project, which will develop a directory of laboratories providing DNA diagnosis for the treatment of genetic diseases. Clinicians will be able to access this directory over the Internet.
Rambo says that using the Internet to connect community hospitals with major research centers is particularly important in the West, where sparsely populated areas are separated by large distances. "Telecommunication and information technologies work particularly well in this setting."