Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, one of four historically black medical schools in the nation and the only one west of the Mississippi River, operates three medical clinics for the education of its medical students and residents. These clinics are located in medically under served areas in Los Angeles County. They are: the UMMA Free Clinic, and the Imperial Heights Health Center, both in Los Angeles; and the Metro-South Provider Network Clinic, Paramount. The university?s Drew Medical Library currently does not have a mechanism by which it can provide needed electronic medical information to these clinics. Medical staff at the three sites are functioning without readily available access to the medical literature. None of the clinic staff has on-site access to the National Library of Medicine?s MEDLARS databases or to the full journal articles indexed in those databases in the clinics where they are treating patients. For this, staff must travel to the medical library on the Drew campus. Our grant proposal is to provide each clinic with a computer and printer, and to link the clinics to the Drew Library?s Web-based citation and full-text databases and the National Library of Medicine?s databases through an Internet Service Provider. The grant would allow the Library to supply needed journal articles to the clinics. In addition, funding is sought for a liaison person to coordinate the project. Under the direction of the principal investigator, these tasks would include supervision of the installation of the clinic computers and their linkages to the Internet, the Drew Medical Library, and NLM. The liaison person also would provide training of clinic staff on database searching, and oversee the document delivery operation.
