Internet Info 1997 December/Internet_Info_CD-ROM_Walnut_Creek_December_1997.iso/isoc/pub/isoc_news/1-1/n-1-1-020.15a.Z/n-1-1-020.15a

Text File | 1994-03-26 | 2KB | 37 lines

N-1-1-020.15  Biomedicine
by Ted Shortliffe, <[e-mail]>


Although late to join the Internet community, biomedical researchers
and educators have been increasingly aggressive in their efforts to
connect to the network and to articulate a vision of what national
electronic connectivity and information access can mean to both the
medical practitioner and the biomedical researcher.  A recent report
from the Institute of Medicine ("Computer-Based Patient Records: An
Essential Technology for Health Care", National Academy Press,
November 1991) has been particularly explicit about the need for an
enhanced role of the biomedical community in national network
planning.  Most academic health science institutions are joined to the
Internet via their main campus computing and communications
facilities.  This has left community hospitals and other nonacademic
healthcare institutions with a limited understanding of the Internet
and a simultaneous lack of models for how they might best get
connected to their regional networks.  The National Library of
Medicine is hoping to address this problem as one aspect of its role
in the national High Performance Computing initiative.

To help address both the clinical and research uses of networking in
biomedicine, the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) has
identified "Broadband Networks, High Speed LANs and Multimedia" as one
of the two tracks in its annual Spring Congress to be held at the
downtown Marriott Hotel in Portland, Oregon from May 7-9, 1992 (the
second track deals with Decision Support Systems in biomedicine).  The
program chairman for the networking track is Dr. Jerome Cox from
Washington University ([e-mail]) and more information about
the meeting may be obtained from the AMIA Offices, 4915 St. Elmo Ave,
Suite 302, Bethesda, MD 20814 (telephone [phone] or email to
[e-mail]).  Abstracts are due January 10, 1992 and the
preliminary program will be available by March 1.