REPORT ON ACCOMPLISHMENTS

The goals of the public health community are to understand the nature of the health problem, the scope of the health burden, the personal, social, and environmental factors associated with the development of chronic illness, and then find ways to prevent or effectively treat these illnesses. The goals also imply that the interest is oriented toward the way how the care is provided for the community and the quality of the care. Information support possesses crucial position through this process. Health care in SLOVAKIA faces rapid and complicated phase of restructuralization and privatization. The relatively poor state of services could be traced to scarce resources for upgrading medical technologies as well as to limited access to information. Therefore the libraries in hospitals, individual physicians, nurses, managers, they all have rather limited access to literature, information and even communication opportunities. After two years of implementing the HealthNet-SR Project we could see the need for expanding its potential for gradual increase of knowledge capabilities and skills of Slovak physicians and students of medicine and nursing. At the same time, unrestricted access to information represents one of the cornerstones of democracy. This particular issue is addressed through the HealthNet project, being developed in Slovakia during the last two years. New technologies of computer communications and networking has led OSF to offer Internet capabilities to wide range of physicians, nurses and other health professionals. The experiences gained throughout the project run has naturally resulted in many new issues to be developed further on. The most important one is a question how to offer the technology to maximum number of potential users with maximizing information flow within the country as well as between individuals in different countries. One step in this direction is represented as the MEDICAL INTERNET PROJECT implemented in Slovakia.

The HealthNet project's objective is to establish an electronic network for use by Slovak health care organizations. In the same dimension to create conditions for sustained information support of health care system in Slovakia through the electronic networking with incrementally increased proportion of financial participation from users. The network is built up incrementally over several years. The secondary objectives are:

• select and train users;
• develop a technical project;
• install equipment;
• contract for services;
• develop and start operations of a center with the WWW site;
• start distribution of documents;
• evaluate the performance.

• Trnava University, Faculty of Nursing, Trnava - newly established institution with teaching assignments;
• Institute of Preventive and Clinical Medicine, Bratislava - major research institute;
• Hospital with Polyclinics in Poprad - hospital with many activities in health care reform;
• Hospital with Polyclinics in Levoca - institution active in quality and cost - effectiveness of care;
• State Health Institute in Povazska Bystrica - institution active in public health research;
• Hospital with Polyclinics in Ruzomberok - active in Hospital Association activities;
• Hospital with Polyclinics in Sahy - active in third sector;
• Hospital with Polyclinics in Trencin - various activities in quality of care;
• Faculty Hospital in Bratislava - major hospital with many educational and research activities;
• Health Management School - nongovernmental school of management, influential in health care reform process;
• Slovak Medical Library, Bratislava - an important resource of health and medicine related information;
• Slovak Chamber of Physicians, Bratislava - important for the reform development;
• National Institute of Tuberculosis and Respiratory Diseases, Podunajske Biskupice - major hospital with many educational and research activities;
• Institute of Tuberculosis and Respiratory Diseases, Vysne Hagy - specialized institution active in research;
• Psychiatry Hospital of Philipp Pinel, Pezinok - specialized institution active in research;
• National Center for Health Promotion, Bratislava - leading institution in health policy development.

There are more institutions collaborating with the project. The collaboration is based on mutual interchange of information and share of experiences. Among them Faculty Hospital in Martin, Specialized State Health Institute in Banska Bystrica are those with the most visible activities.

GRANT PROGRAM

The grant has been already announced in newspapers and the list of applicants is displayed below. The OSF Medical Board will select those proposals, which provide firm guarantee of creation useful WWW pages on their own, or provide useful information for Slovak health professional in close collaboration with HealthNet team. Special consideration will be focused on those proposals, which are compliant with criteria described in Chapter 2c. It is envisaged, that up to 10 grants will be awarded in next few months.

HEALTHNET WEB SITE

Activities of HealthNet are not exclusively oriented to developing knowledge base or information base for Slovak and foreign health professionals. One of the most prominent targets is to increase number of people using this facility to support their daily activities. Therefore public campaign is carried on to market potential of Internet for medical people. HealthNet has been demonstrated several times during medical conferences, seminars, workshops. Short course on HealthNet is provided regularly during education activities in the Institute for Medical Postgraduate Studies, School of Public Health in Trnava University, Medical School in Martin, Health Management School in Bratislava. More than 150 health professionals, mostly physicians, were trained during the courses. In order to increase participation we have recently announced a competition for individuals and institutions with a reward of a year of Internet connectivity.

The project HealthNet with its growing impact on information distribution among local medical society achieved a threshold, when enough users received a training as well as practical skills in everyday usage of its facilities. Therefore it has been felt, that it seems to be the right time to start discussing the role of Internet for medical society. The discussion will hopefully lead to increased communication of people with different backgrounds. It also implies that it would help to overcome communication barriers still existing in closed society of Slovakia. Therefore an invitation for joining the discussions was distributed to all known health professionals (physicians, nurses, other health care professionals, students of medicine, nursing, public health, and others) with an access to e_mail. Following topics were offered for the kick off:

• What further orientation should the HealthNet Project implement;
• New, interesting websites were visited;
• New information, problems, software is available on the web.

The substructure supporting those activities is based on the HealthNet server and the network of Internet providers in Slovakia (PubNet for members in Bratislava and Kosice, SANET for users from other localities). This configuration is important from the point of view of implications for development of Medical Internet Project,    since PubNet has its two centers in Bratislava and Kosice, where the project is focused to as well as HealthNet will provide infrastructure for developing the newproject.