S. Rauch et al., COMMUNITY HOSPITALS AND THE INTERNET - LESSONS FROM PILOT CONNECTIONS, Bulletin of the Medical Library Association, 82(4), 1994, pp. 401-406
Community hospitals in rural and isolated areas have had little access
to the Internet. In 1992, the National Library of Medicine funded a p
ilot project to be conducted by the University of Washington and seven
community hospitals in the northwestern United States. The goals of t
he project were to connect the hospitals to the Internet and study the
uses made of this resource. A number of administrative, technical, fi
nancial, and organizational problems were dealt with in the attempt to
establish the Internet connections and introduce this resource to the
se health care settings. This paper examines these issues and presents
conclusions drawn from the experiences of the project team.