Research, Prevention and Global Health

Advanced applications track
Thursday, April 10, 2003
1:15 p.m. to 2:30 p.m.
Salon B
Crystal Gateway Marriot Hotel

Following from the discussion on "Reaching Collaborators in Hard to Network Parts of the World," this session will focus on the role of the Internet2 Health Sciences community and projects by members to further the cause of prevention of diseases and global health in areas not just where there are dedicated Internet2-type networks, but also in those where there may not be any dedicated research and education networking.

Research programs play a very powerful role in coordination of fundamental technology to support infrastructure necessary for sharing of information resources. Data experts in the Internet2 community and under-resourced countries encourage and facilitate regional knowledge sharing and co-operation in many areas of scientific and technical data.One area of particular emphasis is the promotion and enhancement of development in Prevention and Global Health.

For this session and as the focus of a panel discussion, we will have an assessment of results from projects in the Health Sciences, followed by a process discussion on "Prevention and Global Health" as a driver of the functional requirements of networking and getting to hard to reach to reach endpoints around the world.

Moderator: Julia Royall, National Library of Medicine, National Instutes of Health

• Presentation 1: The CDC has been extended an invitation to address the Internet2 community on use of collaborative tools as researchers and clinicians deal with Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).

• Presentation 2: Health and Digital Disparities,
  Dianne Lewis, ALTA Consulting
  

  Current generation broadband technology has fueled the growth of the U.S. economy during the 1990’s and has positioned the rapid deployment of the next generation technology to access the internet as a high priority. However, deployment is focused on business and higher income urban and suburban residential customers. Underserved communities primarily rural and poor urban communities are lagging seriously behind. The digital divide has inhibited the deployment of the next generation Internet technologies and access to emerging applications.

  Similarly, underserved low-income communities throughout the United States are often geographically, socially and economically isolated from the higher income urban and suburban communities and without a health care infrastructure. During the early 1990’s, U.S. health care industry moved aggressively from fee-for-service to a managed care environment. Insurers/providers found that the low-income and rural communities could be economically attractive. However, many providers and large health systems were located in commercial corridors or suburban communities. Without a presence in these communities, who would provide health care and where?

National and state-wide health systems developed multiple strategies. The development of telehealth/telemedicine solutions was one approach. However, underserved communities, rural and urban, continue to present a challenge to both the deployment of next generation technologies and the structuring of comprehensive health care systems. For this session, Washington, DC, will highlight the issues.

• Presentation 3: Biomedical Research, Health Disparities, and the Digital Divide: Programs at the NCRR
  Susan Kayar, NCRR/NIH

  The National Center for Research Resources (NCRR) is one of 27 Institutes and Centers in the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Department of Health and Human Services. The congressional appropriation for the NIH in FY 2003 is $27 billion. With an operating budget of just over $1 billion, the NCRR is the 9th largest of the institutes and centers within the NIH, and is thus positioned to have a significant impact on developing the infrastructure for biomedical research. The NCRR supports a number of programs that are model examples for addressing global health and health disparities. Two programs within the Division of Research Infrastructure of NCRR, the Research Centers at Minority Institutions (RCMI) and the Institutional Development Award (IDeA) programs, will be described. Some of the activities of these two grantee communities and their needs for high-capacity Internet connectivity will be highlighted. The grantee institutions within these programs have limited access to Internet2 and are currently assessing their needs for connectivity to Internet2 in order to increase their faculties' participation in biomedical research, both basic and clinical.

• Presentation 4: Supercourse: Epidemiology, the Internet and Global Health
  Ron LaPorte, Director, Disease Monitoring and Telecommunications
  WHO Collaborating Centre, Professor of Epidemiology, Graduate School of Public Health, University of Pittsburgh
  

  Prevention is the most cost-effective route to improving global health. Most of prevention is information sharing, if we build a program of telepreventive medicine we could have profound effect on health. We (Supercourse (www.pitt.edu/~super1/)) constructed a network of 9250 academic experts in prevention from 151 countries. We extracted from them 1245 powerpoint lectures in an open source system for use by educators world wide. We distribute these through 37 mirrored sides, including sites in Mongolia, the Sudan and Malaysia. The system is being used as evidence by 75 million hits a year. We are aiming towards Hippocraties day to reach 1,000,000 people with a single prevention lecture.
  
  
  Last updated: 04/07/03 by Ana Preston <apreston@internet2.edu>