University of Iowa links rural providers - Cover Story

Health Management Technology, August, 1994 by Carolyn Dunbar

Virtual Hospital

Perhaps one of the strongest hooks that helped secure the NLM grant was the Virtual Hospital project, already in place at UIHC. The idea started three years ago, according to Jeffrey R. Galvin, M.D., a professor of radiology and director of the Virtual Hospital project. Three UIHC professors realized they needed a way of providing information to medical students that could answer their questions at the time they were doing their work.

Galvin says he began to understand that physicians need to work the way an airplane pilot works, with information coming to them constantly via information systems. Very few human beings are capable of retaining all that they read or hear in lectures, Galvin observes.

"All of this information--whether it's the latest article on how to cure somebody in heart failure, or what's the anatomy of a certain blood vessel that I'm about to put a needle into--should be sitting there, either in my hand, through the network, at the patient's bedside." Galvin says. "I should be able to 'go to the library' through this kind of system and acquire information on demand. It's really sort of a 'just-in-time' learning process, because I think that's the way all of us work."

Galvin and his colleagues began to develop multimedia medical education content to share throughout the UIHC complex, and even began to upload this information to the Internet. He views the Virtual Hospital as the "tele-education" portion of the NLM grant for linking rural healthcare providers to the UIHC resources. In fact, the project success became a strong factor in the overall success of the grant.

Galvin reports that the Virtual Hospital's Internet exposure has been far more explosive than he could ever have imagined. He says his usage estimates were off by a factor of 100. In the last three months alone, 279,000 users all over the world have tapped into the Virtual Hospital via the Internet.

As to what Internet users or Iowa healthcare providers can expect from the Virtual Hospital, Galvin says the plans are just starting and will expand beyond textual educational material to multimedia forms like video presentations of specific surgical procedures, X-rays, MRI scans, CT scans and teleconsultation capabilities between physicians. "In other words, you will be able to send an actual picture of your particular patient," Galvin adds.

Much multimedia information related to the chest--its anatomy and disease information--is now on the system, Galvin says. "But eventually the whole body will be in there."