The Rural Hospital Electronic Library of Michigan (RHELM) project has been designed to provide rural hospitals with electronic resources to access online medical and nursing literature. Saginaw Cooperative Hospitals, Inc., a medical education facility, is the lead organization for the project. SCHI provides education at three principal levels, undergraduate, graduate and CME. In addition, we also have a fully functioning medical library, health clinics and research capabilities. We have partnered with three rural hospitals for this project. SCHI currently works with these hospitals to provide limited information services. None of these hospitals have a person trained in providing library services. A contact person at each of the rural hospitals has been designated to act as the contact for the entire organization who forwards information requests to the medical library at SCHI. The overall goal of the project is to provide access to electronic resources to health professionals in three rural hospitals at the point of care. Specific objectives to reach this goal include purchasing and installing necessary equipment, utilizing free and low cost subscription services (PubMed, MEDLINE, etc.) through connectivity to SCHI's information systems capacity, publicizing the availability of new resources and training, provide hands-on demonstrations and training sessions for medical staff and hospital employees, and conduct follow-up in the form of user satisfaction measurements.
