HOSPITALS TAP INTO VARIETY OF INFORMATION AROUND WORLD

Not too long ago, LifeBeat crews at Southeast Missouri Hospital were having trouble with a certain type of IV pump.

Crew members for the air ambulance service thought vibrations from the helicopter might be causing the problem, said John Taylor, a flight nurse, and wondered if crews for other services were seeing the same problem.

So Taylor posted the question on an Internet bulletin board and waited for an answer.

"Everybody came back with a resounding no, so we decided it was probably something else," he said.

Taylor uses his personal home page on the Internet to keep track of what other air ambulance services are doing.

"The resources that are out there are just phenomenal," he said. "You name it, anything you want is on the Internet."

Southeast Hospital and St. Francis Medical Center are two of many hospitals now on line and are charter sponsors of Show-Me Net, a local information network.

Both facilities have home pages on the 'net, although personnel are still working out what information will be accessible and completing needed links.

"Our site is accessible," said Jay Wolz, a marketing and public relations specialist for St. Francis and one member of the team responsible for bringing the hospital on line.

Not all of the information the hospital wants to make accessible -- up-to-date listings of classes, support groups and community events, lists of medical staff and their specialties and services available -- are now accessible, Wolz said.

"We're looking at doing an on-line health assessment where you do the questionnaire on line," he said. The questionnaire would be scored by hospital staff and feedback given through e-mail or more conventional methods, like over the telephone or through the postal service.

In addition to allowing the public to learn about the hospital and its services, the Internet is one more way for health-care professionals to gain access to medical journals, the Centers for Disease Control and other resources of up-to-date information.

"We hope to have a number of links to other institutions for our web site to access other health-care providers," Wolz said.

Southeast's web site is also still under construction, said Nancy Bray, director of marketing and public relations for the hospital. Both hospitals worked with students from Southeast Missouri State University's mass communications program to develop their web sites.

Wolz and Bray both said they hoped their web sites and links would be complete within a few months.

More and more hospitals are using the Internet, said Barbara Cochran, a spokeswoman for the Missouri Hospital Association.

"It allows health-care providers to have direct access with their peers in getting second opinions in cases like bad asthma or cardiac care," Cochran said.

"It also allows access to other information resources, like on-line journals and medical libraries and direct access to agencies like OSHA and the Health Care Financing Administration. It helps reduce rural isolation so that small rural hospitals can have access to the same information as large urban hospitals."

The Internet and telemedicine -- which provides for video links between institutions, allowing doctors to view procedures as they're performed and aid in diagnoses and transmit X ray images or ultrasound images for aid in diagnoses, -- "are an incredible opportunity for communication," Cochran said.

MHA also has a web site: MHAnet, available on the World Wide Web. It features updates on pertinent legislation and regulatory issues and listings of public meetings, education programs and MHA members and staff.

Taylor has found everything from listings of policies followed by other air ambulance services to outlines of medical procedures, such as how to maintain a patient's airway during flight.

"Some have information about how they dispatch, information about what they're flying, what equipment they use," he said. "Networking's become a big buzzword, and this is a great way to network."

Taylor has chatted with air ambulance services in Finland, London, Canada and France, as well as throughout the U.S.