Beyond the Superhighway

As in other areas of society, the Internet and the World Wide Web are becoming important topics in medical informatics. This is evident from the recent American Medical Informatics Association's 1996 Annual Fall Symposium, where the theme was “Beyond the Superhighway: Exploiting the Internet with Medical Informatics.” Of the over 330 papers and abstracts published in the Proceedings, one third dealt with the Internet and/or the Web. In some cases, system developers demonstrated how this technology can do old tasks in new ways. In other cases, researchers described new tasks that are now possible with this technology. Still others examined this technology to show how it can be evaluated and improved. This paper summarizes their accomplishments.