Intermed: An Internet-based Medical Collaboratory

Abstract

McGill Cognitive Science Centre, McGill University, Montreal, QuebecAbstractThe InterMed Collaboratory is collaborative project involving six participating medical institutions(Stanford University, Columbia University, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Massachusetts GeneralHospital, McGill University, and the University of Utah). There are two broad mandates for theeffort. The first is to further the development, sharing, and demonstration of numerous software andsystem components, data sets, procedures and tools that will facilitate the collaborations and supportthe application goals of these projects. The second is to provide a distributed suite of clinicalapplications, 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 applicationsusing components made available by our collaborators; (2) build new collaborative applications usingshared components and methodology; and (3) provide a broadly applicable model for suchcollaborative work. The testbeds we have pursued are all clinical in their orientation, and theirgeneralization to the larger informatics community, and to clinical practitioners, is an explicit goal ofthe work.Contact address:Edward H. Shortliffe, MD, PhDProfessor of Medicine and of Computer ScienceMSOB X-215, 300 Pasteur DriveStanford University School of MedicineStanford, CA 94305-5479 USA415/725-3385; fax: 415/[e-mail]; http://www-camis.stanford.edu/people/ehs