Invitation and General Information

The symposium, Telemedicine and Telecommunications: Options for the New Century, will be held on the campus of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the William H. Natcher Conference Center (Building 45), Bethesda, Maryland, in early 2001. The conference will bring together current and past telemedicine investigators funded through contracts with the National Library of Medicine (NLM) for the purpose of discussing results obtained and lessons learned in their research. Important goals of this effort are to evaluate the use of communications technology in the implementation and performance of telemedicine activities, and to evaluate the impact of telemedicine on medical care in terms of cost, quality, and access.

On behalf of the NLM, we invite telemedicine researchers, current and prospective users of the telehealth technologies, program managers, funding agency representatives, legislators, regulators, administrators, and the general public to join us in Bethesda.

Papers will be presented by those investigators who have led and/or participated in NLM-funded contracts pertaining to telemedicine from 1994 to 2000 under the High Performance Computing and Communications Program (HPCC) and Telemedicine Initiative awards. Printed abstracts of the papers accepted for presentation will be available at the conference. A CD-ROM will be issued to registrants following the conference that will contain the full papers presented as well as the final contract reports.

Michael J. Ackerman, Ph.D.
Carol B. Haberman, M.S., M.P.A.
Conference Chairs