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University of Louisville IAIMS Update: Greater Louisville's Demand-Side Approach to IAIMS Planning Richard D. Clover, MD, Principal InvestigatorRobert J. Esterhay, Jr., MD, Director, Health Informatics Elizabeth M. Smigielski, Coordinator of Library Marketing Peter L. Walton, MD, Director of Health Information Sciences Judith L. Wulff, Archimedes Project Manager University of Louisville, Louisville, KY In Louisville's academic medical center, university and affiliated healthcare organizations are separate, competing enterprises. How does IAIMS happen in a community of healthcare professionals who operate under a variety of sometimes cooperating, usually competing corporate umbrellas? How do you build partnerships and collaboration across professional and institutional boundaries? How do you plan when there is no single "top" to send edicts "down"? To answer these questions, we facilitated creation of a community of health professionals and a web space where the community can articulate its needs for health information resources. To supplement planning by institutional support groups, such as the entities' information technology units, libraries, and the University's Health Informatics Group, we have explored the "demand" side (bottom up) of health information resources rather than the "supply" side (top down). This planning has been less about information technology and more about people and organizational issues, building new relationships, collaboration, and community. Marketing and promotional activities have played a substantial role in this process. The result of the first year of planning is that the Archimedes Community has been built, including a supporting organization that facilitates communication, nurtures Community components, and promotes and evaluates its activities. Projects that have evolved through the Community include adoption of PDAs by all third-year medical students, student nurse practitioners, and dental students; shared licensing for knowledge resources; formation of the Louisville HIPAA Consortium; utilization of the fiber-optic network connecting all of the downtown Louisville hospitals; and development of the University's Health Data System, a research resource for multi-institutional, normalized, de-identified patient clinical data. Information gathered during the planning process has led to the conclusion that, in this distributed environment, research provides the best avenue for advancing IAIMS concepts. Therefore, for the second planning year, IAIMS efforts will focus first on research, centered on the development of a web-based portal for health research information resources. We have also developed a new reference model for information and technology services that indicates that significant organizational changes at the University's Health Sciences Center (HSC) are in order. Discussions on addressing these changes have begun. This project has been funded in part by Grant Number 1-G08 LM06867-01 A1 from the National Library of Medicine. 10/31/01 |
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