Cook County Hospital, the largest public hospital in the Midwest, provides care to the poor and medically indigent. CCH and its outpatient clinics are part of the Cook County Bureau of Health (Bureau). In 1995 CCH had 32,580 admissions, 11 1,698 adult emergency room visits and 483,000 ambulatory visits at CCH and Bureau outpatient clinics. Its residency programs have 525 physicians and graduate 125 doctors each year. It is a major source of training for medical students, residents and other health professionals from Rush University, the University of Illinois, and Chicago Medical School. The Departments of Medicine, Health Information Systems, and the Academic Center Library at Cook County Hospital (CCH), working with the Departments of Information Services, Internal Medicine and the Library of Health Sciences at Rush-Presbyterian-St.Luke?s Medical Center (Rush), propose to establish Internet connectivity at CCH by connecting the Bureau?s existing TCP/IP Wide Area Network via a secure Internet gateway server on a T-1 line. Establishing CCH Internet connectivity would enable CCH and Rush to accomplish the following: 1) Development of a joint CCH /Rush medical informatics curriculum as an integral component of resident training. This will give graduates the informatics skills essential for practice in the 21st century, including conducting literature searches for evidence-based medicine, accessing Internet medical resources, such as NIH/NLM access to medical databases, patient information, and practice guidelines, and the use of telemedicine. Many CCH graduates work in underserved, low income and high risk communities. Extending the penetration of Internet technologies to these communities would meet an important """"""""Healthy People 2010"""""""" goal. 2) Strengthen the CCH/Rush University academic affiliation by allowing enhanced inter-institutional communication. This includes multimedia documents and World Wide Web home pages, sharing library resources, and integrating departmental calendars for educational/organizational activities. Future plans include webcasting of grand rounds, research forums, and patient/ consumer education programs and down-linking of federal health agency sponsored broadcast programs. 3) Provide access to Internet resources (e.g., PubMed, Usenet groups and archives, web-based federal, state, nonprofit and private medical, public health, and related health sciences resources) to give CCH medical professionals and support staff the ability to communicate with the worldwide medical/health sciences community. Researchers at CCH involved in multi-center studies (e.g., the Women?s Health Initiative, HIVNET, CDC-Chicago Antimicrobial Resistance Project) could also better communicate with their peers, strengthening study recruitment and survey yields by providing access to web-based social marketing and survey technologies. 4) Educate patients and consumers by posting information on public CCH web pages. Examples include health-related topics (developing and maintaining healthy lifestyles, information on medical conditions and treatments) and information on CCH/Bureau services. This dovetails with public/private efforts to establish Internet access to low income and underserved communities in Chicago area public schools, housing projects, public libraries, and community centers serving seniors and youth.
