Transcript Medicine and the Internet - Cedar Rapids Medical Education

Medicine and the Internet
Don Nelson and Gordon Baustian
Overview
 What
is the Internet?
 How did it come about?
 What can it do for physicians?
 How can I get connected?
 Prospects for the future
What is the Internet?
 A loosely
organized, but effective, network
of computers and smaller networks
 A set of rules (protocols) for computers to
make connections to other computers and to
request and transfer information
TCP/IP
ppp:
How we got the Internet
 Department
of Defense support for
computing research
 (Defense) Advanced Research Projects
Agency: ARPANET (1969)
 Share expensive experimental computers
($$$) among researchers
How we got the Internet
 The
Cold War
 Need for “disaster-proof”network
 Decentralized
 Reconfigure itself
 Work around outages
Terminology
 Hosts
/ Servers
– Systems that supply information
– More-or-less permanent connection to the Net
 Clients
– Systems that request information
– May be intermittently connected
 One
system may play both roles
How it grew!!
 The
PC revolution -- Cheap computers!
 Millions of users
 Hypertext
 The World Wide Web (WWW)
Hypertext
 Ability
to embed references to other
documents
 References “Links” are active
 Move from one item to another by selecting
a link
Hypertext
This
is ordinary text from a
Web Page
This is hypertext
Hypertext
 HTML Hypertext
Markup Language
– Create documents with links to other
documents
 HTTP Hypertext Transfer
Protocol
– Send HTML documents from one computer to
another
 One
resource can “contain” others
anywhere
 Hence “World Wide Web”
What is a URL?
 Uniform
Resource Locator
 An address to any item on the Internet
http://www.microsoft.com/index.htm
Name of host computer
Protocol to use
The item
requested
What do I need?
 Computer
 Modem
or other connection
 Software -- Browser
– Netscape Navigator
– Microsoft Internet Explorer
 Internet
provider
– Compuserve, America Online
– Physicians Online
– Local provider: CR Library, etc.
What Lies Ahead?
 Patient
education on line
 Secure transactions
 Access to medical records?
 Patients schedule own appointments?
Where to get more information
 Mercy
Library classes
 Local user groups
 Computer store classes
 Books: Hutchinson: A Pocket Guide to the
Medical Internet
 Surf yourself