dougan@tcgould.tn.cornell.edu (William L. Dougan) (04/15/88)
I am a part of a team at Cornell University working on a project sponsored by NYSERNet, the New York State Education and Research Network (one of the regional data telecommunications networks supported in part by the NSF). We are trying: (1)to determine current and future needs for wide-area network services among educators and researchers and (2)to make recommendations about services and applications that could be introduced to fulfill those needs. My specific responsibility is to concentrate on education and research at universities and medical institutions. Other individuals are concentrating on K-12 and vocational schools, users of supercomputing resources, and university/industry research relations. In order to improve the quality of our report, we are interested in gathering ideas, opinions, references and background information from members of the Usenet community. We are addressing a request to this forum to help us identify: (1)current and future needs for wide-area network services among members of the medical community (2)descriptions of ongoing efforts to serve those needs (3)suggestions for future networked services and (4)statements of problems that must be considered by anyone attempting to deliver network services to the medical community. If you can help us, please send e-mail to one of the addresses listed below. If you are extremely interested, but don't have the time to compose an extended e-mail message, send us your name and a telephone number. We are particularly interested in talking to faculty and students in medical schools, professional staff at medical research institutes and computing or telecommunications staff at either type of organization. As usual, I'll try to summarize e-mail for the Usenet. Examples of possible topics include the following *Telecommunications-intensive research efforts involving cooperation among researchers at many institutions *Remotely-accessible databases of medical images, genetic information, research results or bibliographic information (e.g. MEDLINE) *Efforts to computerize medical instruction, particularly ones that could eventually be made available to many institutions. (e.g. - Hypermedia applications developed at Cornell Medical School). *Efforts to collectivize medical instruction in ways that take advantage of scarce human resources or unusual clinical situations. (e.g. - Satellite video links currently used for continuing education ) *Research efforts which currently use or could eventually use remote access to shared resources such as supercomputers, specialized diagnostic facilities, or specialized treatment facilities. *Efforts to provide remote access to expert systems or medical reference facilities that might be too large, expensive or rapidly changing to distribute via CD-ROM. (e.g. - DXplain or AIDS surveillance statistical summaries from the Center for Disease Control). Thanks in advance for your contributions and sorry for multiple postings. W.L. Dougan 515 Malott Hall dougan@crnlgsm Cornell University 607/255-6443 dougan@tcgould.tn.cornell.edu Ithaca, NY 14853