The Nicholas Institute of Sports Medicine and Athletic Trauma (NISMAT) at Lenox Hill Hospital has maintained an Internet connection and web presence since 1995. This has proved very successful. NISMAT staff use the Internet constantly for research and educational purposes. Electronic mail is used to maintain contact with collaborators at other institutions and has largely replaces memoranda and voice mail as a means of exchanging information between staff at NISMAT. Even internally, much of our information, such as data from carious studies and scheduling, is accessed via web-based technologies. Our website has won many accolades in the sports medicine community (including being named one of the top four sports medicine websites by the American College of Sports Medicine in October 1999), as well as much praise from people who have accessed it from around the world. While these are all excellent, our current setup is limited. Since our website is not a primary responsibility (NISMAT is a research institute with a clinical sports medicine program), it does not receive the best of resources. Currently, it is running on an inadequate computer. While this is able to run the site effectively, it also functions as Internet gateway for the institute, firewall, and processes incoming mail as well; concentrating all this functionality on one computer not only slows the processing of each function, but also increases the possibility of a breach of security. Also, our connection to the Internet, established using the available technology in 1995, is a 56 kbit/sec, dedicated frame relay connection; this is slow and quite expensive. We propose to modernize and improve the NISMAT Internet connection through the NLM Internet Connection Grant in several ways. First, in order to provide better availability of services both for staff and users of our website, we wish to increase the speed of our connection using a symmetrical digital subscriber line (sDSL) technology. Such a connection will be much faster than our current one at a comparable cost. Also, with Internet access becoming increasingly mission-critical and less of a luxury, we need to acquire higher quality server and firewall computers (ideally, splitting these two functions for better security). These improvements will allow us to more easily perform research, and facilitate sharing our findings with the community at large. Also, we will be able to expand our website, as its contents will no longer be limited to text and small images, but can be expanded to include video of proper exercise techniques. This will be a significant enhancement for not only our patients, who make use of the material on the site, but also people from around the world who are trying to improve their health and well-being through exercise.
