A real-time library of medicine for practicing physicians.

An on-line, practice-oriented library system now exists in prototype form which can act as a central repository of medical information. The source data are gathered by the residents at Shands Teaching Hospital and Clinics at the University of Florida as part of their rotation through clinical pathology. The information is continually updated and reviewed every 3 months by new residents and area specialists. Plans are under way to make this pool of information accessible to all levels of the health care team in an instantaneously addressable fashion via CRT (cathode ray tube). After many months of resource development, we have major sections of an on-line dictionary of clinical and surgical pathology and expect to expand this in the future to include a medical problem-oriented indexing system, a disease-oriented library, and a page-associated file of reference.