The Virtual Hospital (VH) is a project of the Electric Differential Multimedia Laboratory, Department of Radiology, University of Iowa College of Medicine. It is a continuously updated digital health sciences library stored on computers and available over high speed networks 24 hours a day. The VH provides invaluable patient care support and distance learning to practicing physicians and other healthcare professionals. Its Iowa Health Book provides information to the general public on a variety of health issues.
The VH may be used to answer patient care questions, thus putting the latest medical information at physicians' fingertips. This same information may be used for Continuing Medical Education (CME), delivering CME to physicians' offices and homes at their convenience. The VH is built on existing Internet communication standards and uses the World-Wide Web (WWW) software technology to store, organize, and distribute our multimedia textbooks (MMTBs). We define a MMTB to be a program that patterns its user interface after a printed textbook. Our MMTBs incorporate functions such as free text searching, the ability to play video and audio clips, and to display an unlimited number of high-resolution images.
The VH can be accessed via the Internet by using a WWW browser. To view image files, a graphical browser such as Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer is required. To load our video or audio clips, some helper applications may be necessary.
For more information about the VH, send e-mail to: librarian@vh.org.
Electric Differential Multimedia Laboratory Information and Bibliography