Integrated Medical Curriculum

The Integrated Medical Curriculum (IMC) fee based website offers medical courses taught in medical school. The courses have search features, in-depth text coverage, animations, streaming audio and video, photos and illustrations, and interactive quizzes. There are courses on basic clinical skills, embryology, anatomy, histology, pharmacology, physiology, immunology, hematology, radiology, musculoskeletal pathology, medical ethics, and other areas. There is also a clinical pharmacology database online and one for Pocket PC’s. See http://www.imc.gsm.com.

A.D.A.M.

A.D.A.M. Inc. is an Atlanta based publisher of interactive, visually engaging health and medical information for healthcare organizations, medical professionals, consumers and students. A.D.A.M. products contain physician-reviewed text, graphics produced in-house by medically trained illustrators, and multimedia interactivity to create health information solutions that offer a unique "visual learning" experience in both the healthcare and education markets. See http://www.adam.com.

Snomed

SNOMED International, a division of the College of American Pathologists (CAP), oversees the strategic direction and scientific maintenance of the Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine, better known as SNOMED®, a comprehensive, multiaxial, controlled terminology created for the indexing of the entire medical record.

See http://www.snomed.org

See the Wall Street Journal Articlehttp://webreprints.djreprints.com/590960207231.html

Health Level 7 (HL7)

Founded in 1987, Health Level Seven, Inc. (www.HL7.org) is a not-for-profit, ANSI-accredited standards developing organization dedicated to providing a comprehensive framework and related standards for the exchange, integration, sharing, and retrieval of electronic health information that supports clinical practice and the management, delivery and evaluation of health services. Its 2,200 members represent over 500 corporate members, including 90 percent of the largest information systems vendors serving healthcare. International affiliates have also been established in 19 countries throughout the globe.

See http://www.hl7.org

CCOW

Health Level Seven's Clinical Context Management Specification Version 1.4 has been named as an American National Standard by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). The Specification, more commonly known as CCOW, focuses on facilitating the integration of healthcare applications at the point of use so that multiple, independently authored applications can work seamlessly with one another from the caregiver's perspective. CCOW complements HL7's traditional emphasis on data interchange and enterprise workflow.

The CCOW standard establishes the basis for ensuring secure and consistent access to patient information from heterogeneous sources through coordinating applications at the clinical desktop so that they instinctively follow a specific context, such as the identity of a user or a patient.

When applications are synchronized via context, the user's experience is one of interacting with a single system, when in fact he or she may be using multiple, independent applications from many different systems, each via its native user interface. For example, a caregiver logs in once and selects a patient of interest. Instantaneously, all of the applications tune their data displays to that same patient's information.

With CCOW-based solutions in place, caregivers can use collections of applications in ways that mirror their train of thought, encouraging the utilization of electronically available information and increasing patient safety. In addition, CCOW support for secure context management provides a healthcare-standards basis for addressing HIPAA requirements. For instance, CCOW enables the deployment of highly secure single sign-on solutions.

See http://www.hl7.org/press/20020827.asp