THE HEALTHNET PROJECT - EXTENDING ONLINE INFORMATION RESOURCES TO END-USERS IN RURAL HOSPITALS

The importance of easily available, high quality, and current biomedic al literature within the clinical enterprise is now widely documented and accepted. Access to this information has been shown to have a dire ct bearing on diagnosis, choices of tests, choices of drugs, and lengt h of hospital stay. However, many health professionals do not have ade quate access to current health information, particularly those practic ing in rural, isolated, or underserved hospitals. Thanks to a three-ye ar telemedicine award from the National Library of Medicine, The Unive rsity of Iowa (UI) has developed a high-speed, point-to-point telecomm unications network to deliver clinical and educational applications to ten community-based Iowa hospitals. One of the services offered over the network allows health professionals from the site hospitals to acc ess online health databases and order articles via an online document delivery service. Installation, training, and troubleshooting support are provided to the remote sites by UI project staff. To date, 1,339 h ealth professionals from the ten networked hospitals have registered t o use the Healthnet program. Despite the friendly interface on the com puter workstations installed at the sites, training emerged as the key issue in maximizing health professional utilization of these programs .