Planned Parenthood of Northern New England (PPNNE) is a nonprofit organization serving 60,000 people annually with reproductive health care and sexuality education services at 26 health centers and 3 administrative offices across Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. The PPNNE Health Center Internet Access Project proposes to reconfigure our current computer network system to a wide area network and provide PCs and Internet access and Internet user training to all of PPNNE's sites by the year 2001. Funding from this grant will cover the cost of equipment and consultant time needed to provide an Internet connection to 6 of PPNNE's health centers. Activities proposed in this grant have three clear goals: 1. Provide practitioners and health care associates at 6 PPNNE health centers with high-speed access to Internet-based information and library resources. 2. Establish a connection at each health center to facilitate on-line access to internal resources (data, forms, protocols, etc.), secure data storage, centralized databases, and communication and collaboration. 3. Complete the configuration for PPNNE's long range technical goal of bringing each health center and administrative site onto one wide area network that is PC-based to ensure that PPNNE can participate in a competitive health care market whose communications infrastructure is increasingly Internet-based. In order to accomplish these goals, grant funds will be used to purchase equipment for 5 PPNNE health centers and to pay for consultant work to install the equipment and connect the 6 health centers to the Internet. PPNNE is committed to incorporate state of the art communication technology into patient care to ensure the best possible quality of care and customer service. To that end, we will assume all ongoing costs of training in Internet use and managing the proposed Internet connection beyond the project scope and year.
