9318080 Morris Tufts University School of Medicine is part of the Tufts Health Sciences Campus which is a confederation of separately administered institutions with cooperative arrangements to fulfill shared missions of patient care, education and research. These institutions include Tufts University's four health-science schools and the USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging; the New England Medical Center and 30 affiliated clinical teaching sites throughout New England. Tufts University School of Medicine proposes to provide Internet linkage to 2100 faculty located in over 30 affiliated hospitals throughout New England either by direct dedicated 56 KBS line for those hospitals with or planning to have a hospital backbone or by dial-in service to physicians for whom direct connection is not possible. This Internet connection will impact patient care, education, research and facilitate administrative matters. Specific benefits to be derived from this grant will be to improve the following; communication between 3300 Tufts faculty; collaboration on multi-center research projects; medical education for its students at remote sites; potential for remote consultation; access to factual and bibliographic database, including access to Medline, available at Tufts through the Tufts Healthnet and through the Internet; and access to referred patients' clinical data. The grant's objectives are to link three hospitals with network backbones by dedicated 56 KBS datalines directly to the Internet and to provide dial-in service for physicians at hospitals not directly connected to a backbone. In addition, to further the objectives of Tufts University School of Medicine Robert Wood Johnson Foundation planning grant, access will be provided to physicians who become part of the Community Physician Educator Program whose goal is to increase the number of generalist physicians.
