AN ELECTRONIC CONSUMER HEALTH LIBRARY - NETWELLNESS(TM)

NetWellness(TM) is a community-based, consumer-defined grant program s upporting the delivery;of electronic health information to rural resid ents of southern Ohio and urban and suburban communities in the Greate r Cincinnati tri-state region, NetWellness is a collaboratively develo ped and publicly and privately funded demonstration project. Informati on is delivered via ISDN, standard dial, dedicated network connections , and the Internet, TriState Online (Greater Cincinnati's Free-Net) an d other southern Ohio Free-Nets are key access points in the larger pr oject communities. The other access points are more than forty worksta tions distributed at public sites throughout the project's primary geo graphical area, Design strengths and limitations, training initiatives , technical issues, and the project's impact on medical librarianship are examined in this paper. Also discussed are ways of determining com munity needs and interest, building political alliances, finding and d eveloping funding sources, and overcoming technical obstacles, NetWell ness's Internet address is: http://www.netwellness.org.