InterMed: An Internet-Based Medical Collaboratory

The InterMed Collaboratory is collaborative project involving six participating medical institutions (Stanford University, Columbia University, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, McGill University, and the University of Utah). There are two broad mandates for the effort. The first is to further the development, sharing, and demonstration of numerous software and system components, data sets, procedures and tools that will facilitate the collaborations and support the application goals of these projects. The second is to provide a distributed suite of clinical applications, guidelines, and knowledge-bases for clinical, educational, and administrative purposes. We believe that, working together with the Internet as our vehicle for collaboration, we can: (1) accelerate our individual progress in building advanced clinical, educational, and research applications using components made available by our collaborators; (2) build new collaborative applications using shared components and methodology; and (3) provide a broadly applicable model for such collaborative work. The testbeds we have pursued are all clinical in their orientation, and their generalization to the larger informatics community, and to clinical practitioners, is an explicit goal of the work. Contact address: Edward H. Shortliffe, MD, PhD Professor of Medicine and of Computer Science MSOB X-215, 300 Pasteur Drive Stanford University School of Medicine Stanford, CA 94305-5479 USA 415/725-3385; fax: 415/725-7944 [email protected]; http://www-camis.stanford.edu/people/ehs