About the Office of Medical Informatics

The Office of Medical Informatics was created by the Dean in 1990 to enhance the medical education and patient care missions of the College of Medicine. For the past five years our office has endeavored to develop appropriate and cost-effective information technologies in these areas:

• The Online Medical Record (OLMR) is a joint project between Shands Hospital and the College of Medicine. It has been available in the hospital and clinics since June 1992. Since that time it has become an indispensable part of patient care, administration, education, and research at our institution. Between 800 and 1200 individuals access the system during a typical month. The OLMR currently holds over 100 million documents and lab results.
• Our office works directly with faculty to develop computer assisted instruction for undergraduate, graduate, and continuing medical education. Major projects at this time include: radiologic anatomy CD-ROM, human anatomy CD-ROM, microscopic anatomy CD-ROM, Web-based microbiology cases and "bugs" database, general and systemic pathology, geriatric education Web site, muscoskeletical pathology Web site and CD-ROM, Grand Rounds Online streaming media, and obstetric ultrasound.
• Our office does extensive work with World Wide Web publishing, including the Hypertext Markup Language development tool "MTX." Our sites are located at:
  • http://medinfo.ufl.edu/
  • http://apps.medinfo.ufl.edu/
• We are working directly with students and housestaff to develop and acquire effective patient software for use with small hand-held computers. We are currently developing portable intructional materials for the Palm OS devices.
• We are actively working to develop programs in telemedicine and distance education. We work extensively with online testing and evaluation.