The purpose of this project is to create the Texas Tech El Paso Virtual Campus, linking resources from faculty to students and residents as well as linking resources from the Texas Tech Medical Center at El Paso to patients and the community. From an internal perspective, this project will make electronic resources more readily available to faculty, staff, residents and medical students split between a primary facility and twelve geographically remote clinical sites. It will remove obstacles to faculty making curricular materials available to other faculty, residents and students, while providing better access to digital materials from the Library of the Health Sciences, the National Library of Medicine and the American Medical Association among others. Information about utilizing health care services provided through Texas Tech Medical Center would be readily accessible to the external community in English and in Spanish. In addition, patient education materials, produced in-house in English and Spanish, would be added to the Texas Tech web site. These in-house materials with links to consumer health sites including MEDLINEplus, Healthfinder, NOAH, etc., and information on utilizing Texas Tech medical services would be integrated into the Virtual Campus to create a consumer health web site, the Border Consumer Health Information Project (BCHIP). The BCHIP would be promoted in the community and would serve as a bilingual community resource for quality health care and wellness information. Patient Education Stations would be established at Texas Tech El Paso's busiest clinics to promote the BCHIP and librarians would rotate through the clinics to assist patients in retrieving health information. Focus groups and survey instruments will determine materials to be added to the Texas Tech El Paso Virtual Campus and the order in which material will be added. Use data will be collected to track and measure changing patterns of use for components of the Virtual Campus once the it is launched. As the project progresses, users will be surveyed about the Virtual Campus and its usefulness.
