A first evaluation of a pedagogical network for medical students at the University Hospital of Rennes.

A pedagogical network has been developed at University Hospital of Rennes from 1996. The challenge is to give medical information and informatics tools to all medical students in the clinical wards of the University Hospital. At first, nine wards were connected to the medical school server which is linked to the Internet. Client software electronic mail and WWW Netscape on Macintosh computers. Sever software is set up on Unix SUN providing a local homepage with selected pedagogical resources. These documents are stored in a DBMS database ORACLE and queries can be provided by specialty, authors or disease. The students can access a set of interactive teaching programs or electronic textbooks and can explore the Internet through the library information system and search engines. The teachers can send URL and indexation of pedagogical documents and can produce clinical cases: the database updating will be done by the users. This experience of using Web tools generated enthusiasm when we first introduced it to students. The evaluation shows that if the students can use this training early on, they will adapt the resources of the Internet to their own needs.

A network of web multimedia medical information servers for a medical school and university hospital.

Modern medicine requires a rapid access to information including clinical data from medical records, bibliographic databases, knowledge bases and nomenclature databases. This is especially true for University Hospitals and Medical Schools for training as well as for fundamental and clinical research for diagnosis and therapeutic purposes. This implies the development of local, national and international cooperation which can be enhanced via the use and access to computer networks such as Internet. The development of professional cooperative networks goes with the development of the telecommunication and computer networks and our project is to make these new tools and technologies accessible to the medical students both during the teaching time in Medical School and during the training periods at the University Hospital. We have developed a local area network which communicates between the School of Medicine and the Hospital which takes advantage of the new Web client-server technology both internally (Intranet) and externally by access to the National Research Network (RENATER in France) connected to the Internet network. The address of our public web server is http:(/)/www.med.univ-rennesl.fr.

W.W.W. cooperative multimedia interface in medicine.

The World Wide Web is now the most used multimedia information system on Internet allowing, by means of Web browsers such as Netscape Navigator or Mosaic, distribution or consultation of hypermedia documents. Although the Web has appeared only recently, the growth of its use has generated the emergence of numerous information and knowledge bases in the medical field. We suggest to investigate extended functionalities in order to introduce cooperative activities in our medical information system. These new activities allow asynchronous exchange of records and synchronous cooperation for a better coordination of the work within and between hospitals.