While not a key part of the IAIMS initiative, the network will facilitate enhancements in two areas benefiting the IUSM: education and research. The first of these is education.  IUSM uses ANGEL, a web-based curriculum management system, for course delivery and distributed learning.  Medical students rotate through all hospitals in the target area and while they are currently able to get access to ANGEL, there is no common interface in the different hospitals.  This will be easily addressed through the proposed project.

Because of the need to capture clinical data in a secure environment outside of the individual hospital's clinical data repository, this data will enhance the immense clinical data repository already available at the Regenstrief Institute and make this system the premier source of clinical data for many future research projects.  In addition, we have developed a new generation of query tools (SPIN Query Tool) based on our earlier FastRetrieval (a very fast tool for identifying cohorts and creating basic descriptions) as part of an NCI funded project. 

In addition to supporting traditional biomedical research, the I3 will create an outstanding laboratory for studying medical informatics innovations. With the extensive data linkages and software tools, researchers will have many opportunities to study questions that cannot be studied anywhere else.

The creation of the PING portal, while not a new concept, is innovative in its integration with a community wide health information network.  Establishing this portal promises to improve health literacy among the patient populations while fostering physician-patient communication.  Providing that the proposed evaluation proves the efficacy of this approach, it could serve as a model for other institutions and communities.

We have successfully used various access control methods including IP and domain authentication for access to electronic resources in the Medical Libraries at Indiana University. We will use these same methods for access control but determining the resources that the user should have access to based on the resources the user is authorized to access. For non-standard information access, each hospital will be assigned an information access score based on the numbers and quality of e-resources.  This will determine the default for affiliated providers.  Each provider, when entered into the GDF, will have all of his or her hospital affiliations noted.  These affiliations, coupled with the information access score of the affiliated hospitals, will determine the default access to knowledge-based resources.  Dr. McGowan, during Year 1, will work with the partner libraries to establish the greatest level of access to e-resources possible through consortium purchases.  Each partner library's e-resource collection will be analyzed and weighted.  At the same time, I3 programmers and IUSM systems staff will establish pathways through proxy servers to allow provider access to the greatest allowable number of e-resources by default while offering user mediated access to any titles to which the provider is entitled based on license agreements.

We will track accesses to these resources and we will survey users on their satisfaction with these resources using Likert scale questions.

Ruth Lily Medical Library - Indiana University School of Medicine