Although most public attention to the Internet ("the information superhighway") has been on retrieving information ("surfing the net"), the other side - electronic publishing - is of special interest to academic medical centers in their multiple roles as health care providers, biomedical researchers, and medical educators. In the past year the School of Medicine established an institutional service for electronic publishing over the Internet based on World Wide Web (or simply Web) technology (http://www.med.yale.edu). This Web service allows departments and other organizations to readily author multimedia (text, image, sound and video) documents which can then be made broadly available to personal computers connected to the campus network or to the Internet beyond. Although this service is relatively new, a variety of creative uses have already been found to meet important institutional missions and goals.
Yale-New Haven Hospital is using Web publications to support public relations, outreach to the patient community, and referral services for community physicians (http://www.med.yale.edu /ynhh). The Hospital's publication was developed by Jan Taylor and Tom Urtz of the Office of Public Information, and it has already received mention in the New York Times as the first such effort by a Connecticut hospital to reach out through the Internet. The Hospital used the Web to provide timely information on the Special Olympics in New Haven this summer and is now using the Web to provide detailed information on clinical services to both patients and physicians in the community.
The Admissions Office of the School of Medicine is using Web publications to provide information to prospective medical students throughout the country and even to allow electronic submission of applications. The Admissions Office mounted an online version of its traditional Admissions Viewbook for prospective medical students last winter . The Viewbook, which is accessed by well over 1,000 Internet users each month, includes a downloadable version of the School's application form. Thomas Lentz, Assistant Dean for Admissions, sees the Web as a useful recruitment tool: "Hopefully, this will make information on the School, academic programs, Office for Women in Medicine, Minority Affairs, etc. accessible and attract interest in the school. So far, about 1/3 of the applications we have received for the class entering in 1996 have been filled out [using the Web-based application form]".
Academic departments are using the Web to help recruit students as well and to encourage and support research. Carolyn Slayman, Deputy Dean for Research and Scientific Affairs, has been a strong advocate of the utility of the Web for these purposes and helped initiate an effort to encourage and support departmental Web publications. As a result a faculty committee worked over this summer to develop a template for departmental publications. Every department now has been given this template and the documentation and initial training necessary to begin publishing Web documents. The template includes a directory of faculty and their research interests and descriptions of educational, research, and clinical programs within the department. Many departments, including Cell Biology, Neurology, Pharmacology, and
Psychiatry, already have department pages (home pages) and those departments without pages are in the midst of their own authoring efforts.
The Office of Grants and Contract Administration is in the final stages of publishing a collection of online resources to help faculty and their support staff find, apply for, and manage grants and contracts. Richard Peterson is working with faculty and administrators to build on previous efforts such as the existing CRISP Plus database of ongoing research projects and the Research Affairs section of the Yale biomedical gopher. The Research Affairs Web resources will include information on funding opportunities from NIH and elsewhere, core research resources and facilities at Yale, research policies and procedures, copies of electronic forms used in applying for and managing grants, and databases of currently funded research.
As you can see from these projects, electronic publication using Web technology brings life to the concept of providing information when it is needed, where it is needed. Faculty, students, care providers, and staff anywhere in the Medical Center can now publish electronic documents that can be accessed from virtually any personal computer within the Medical Center. The same technology can be used to reach out to undergraduate schools for potential students, to other research institutions for potential collaborators, and to the local patient and physician communities. Web technology is clearly emerging as a major component of the Medical Center's IAIMS efforts.