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Welcome to the Indiacybermed@mailman.srv.ualberta.ca mailing list! Welcome to Indiacybermed!

This E-mail discussion group is devoted to enhancing health uses of the Internet across all areas of medicine in India. An early aim of the group is the creation of an offshoot of the existing http://www.cyber-medicine.org site, which would be specifically devoted to sharing innovations among Indian Health web sites, thereby enhancing the quality of information presented across all disciplines.

We anticipate that discussion will be focused on evaluation of current medical Internet resources in India and ways in which innovations and good ideas can be shared amongst these to increase the overall quality of medical Internet resources in India and encourage greater physician participation in Internet communications. Currently many Indian physicians have computers and Email addresses but fewer than 1% use them actively. One of our main purposes is to try to greatly increase that percentage, thus enhancing the quality of Indian health care.

Although there are limitations of the use of the Internet and Email in our daily lives due to the infrastructure available, the benefits of the use are unlimited. These benefits frequently go unrecognized because of lack of utilization which then becomes a vicious cycle. We need to combine efforts to break this negative cycle and to make optimum use of technology in our day to day practice.

The establishment of this group was an interesting partnership between two individuals who have never met face to face, Dr. Kim Solez in Edmonton, Canada, who directs the worldwide NKF cybernephrology initiative, the Informatics Commission of the International Society of Nephrology, and the cyberMedicine.org web site, and Naina Pandita who is a medical information specialist heading the Indian MEDLARS Centre at the National Informatics Centre in New Delhi, India.

Our initiative was specifically stimulated by Dr. Aniket Joshi, an Indian internist with an interest in nephrology and informatics, who challenged us to create something like http://www.cyber-medicine.org specifically for India.

The three of us expect that this group will evolve quite considerably over the years and we urge subscribers to play an active role in making this happen. The end result should be a substantial improvement in the quality of health web sites in India as well as greater awareness of the resources available and a substantial increase in physician participation in the use of Internet resources and E-mail communication for the betterment of the overall health of the Indian population.

There are no limitations on membership to this group. Any interested party can play an active role in our discussions. We expect that further rules for participation will be developed as the size of the group grows.

The technical details of the group are given below. We invite your active participation!

Kim Solez, M.D. Kim.Solez@UAlberta.CA Naina Pandita naina@medlar0.delhi.nic.in Moderators - INDIACYBERMED

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