Ohio Valley Community Health Information Network: design considerations

The Ohio Valley Community Health Information Network (OVCHIN) is a community-based, consumer-defined grant program to determine the efficacy of delivering health information to the rural residents of southern Ohio and to the urban and suburban communities in the Greater Cincinnati tri-state region. The OVCHIN is a collaboratively-developed and publicly and privately funded demonstration project. Consumer health information delivery is via ISDN, standard dial-up, dedicated network connections and the Internet. TriState Online (Greater Cincinnati´s free-net) and other southern Ohio free-nets are key access points in the larger project communities. The other access points are 40 workstations distributed in public sites throughout the grant´s primary geographical target area. Determining community needs and interest, building political alliances, finding and developing funding sources and overcoming technical obstacles are discussed. Design strengths, limitations and technical opportunities are the primary foci of this paper. OVCHIN´s Internet address is: http://www.ovchin.uc.edu