THE VIRTUAL HOSPITAL - PROVIDING MULTIMEDIA DECISION-SUPPORT TOOLS VIA THE INTERNET

Physicians in the clinical setting remain isolated from important sour ces of medical information. The authors have created a multimedia data base known as The Virtual Hospital that improves access to current med ical data, which is used to improve patient care decisions. The Virtua l Hospital is a digital health sciences library stored on a server (co mputer) at The University of Iowa and delivered via the Internet to in expensive personal computers in the workplace. The emerging standard o f the World Wide Web is used to provide cross-platform distribution.