Diagnostic testing will extend from the home to the most sophisticated acute care settings. Throughout the network, clinical and managerial information will be accessible, as needed, at all points of use. A computer course in epidemiology and medical statistics could be taught using internet. The subjects taught are well suited to this medium. Internet was used to establish a small network of public health researchers and teachers.
Participants are from Canada, Hungary, Israel, Norway, and Australia.
Networks of this type not only facilitate international collaboration within public health but they also enable international collaborative research and teaching projects that would have been too cumbersome and time consuming to initiate and conduct without this communication facility. It is a joint program between the five Hungarian medical schools and ten universities in European countries. Nevertheless, the high speed and ease of information transfer by computer network and the vast resources becoming available on the Internet make it inevitable that the use of computer networks to temper disasters will increase enormously in the next decade. The Internet will provide a key means through which networks initially dedicated solely to medical purposes and the individuals who use them will become involved not only in disaster response and mitigation worldwide, but in the global community and consciousness that is the Internet.