Organizing the chaotic medical Internet

This paper presents an approach to the organization of medical information on the Internet's World Wide Web. The medical Internet has grown rapidly during the past couple of years, but into a very chaotic form. It is valuable to physicians, nurses, healthcare professionals, and patients to supplement normal medical library searching. However, they need an easier, better organized, and quicker way for efficiently accessing important medical resources. They need to solve clinical problems, educate patients, learn about new drugs and medical devices, and support medical/legal problems by accessing a well organized database of professional quality information. A study has been in process for almost two years to support local hospitals as they learn how best to utilize resources of the medical Internet. Searchers for information reviewed numerous medical sites, Horne Pages, and their file contents. Many searches for clinical information were conducted during this time were run to identify the best commercial, government, and university medical sites; learn efficient search procedures; and compare the search process on the Internet with the standard medical library approach. A list of medical Internet addresses was compiled and published for hospital and medical student use. In order to group these addresses for computer purposes, the classification systems of the Library of Congress and the National Library of Medicine (NLM) were reviewed. A medical Internet tree structure is being considered. The results will be published. Lessons learned from this research about organizing the medical Internet are offered in this paper.