ONCOLINK - A MULTIMEDIA ONCOLOGY INFORMATION RESOURCE ON THE INTERNET

This paper describes OncoLink, the first multimedia World-Wide-Web (WW W) and gopher server focusing on cancer information for both the healt h care professional and the patient. OncoLink provides an internetwork ed hypertext and multimedia resource linking people, computers and inf ormation together in an easy to use fashion. Our objective in developi ng OncoLink is to provide comprehensive and timely information about m any aspects of oncology for both patients and healthcare providers. Sp ecifically, OncoLink's purposes are: (1) the rapid dissemination of in formation relevant to treatment of cancer and concomitant problems; (2 ) education of health care personnel (at all levels) in the field; (3) education of patients and families of patients who have cancer; (4) p osting of clinical trials and eligibility criteria; (5) the rapid coll ection and dissemination of quality, peer-reviewed information pertine nt to oncology in general and specific subspecialities; (6) provide a well-organized, frequently updated hypertext system to access other qu ality cancer information resources on the Internet. OncoLink attempts to provide one-stop shopping for the patient, healthcare provider, res earcher or Internet browser searching for cancer-related information. Since its inception on March 7, 1994, OncoLink has averaged more than 36,000 accesses per month from around the world. While also accessible by text-based gopher servers, preliminary observations infer increase d use of multimedia and hypertext documents over traditional text-only resources. From the large following of users, it is clear that electr onic dissemination of high quality, peer-reviewed cancer information i s very popular. We conclude OncoLink is both useful and has wide inter est in the international community. We believe, in the future, such sy stems will become common media for the international dissemination of cancer and other medical information.