New Nephrology portal http://www.cybernephrology.org
Kim Solez, M.D.
cyberNephrology is heading toward in the year 2000.
Our mission continues to be:
* to provide the most up-to-date continuing professional education
* to educate the public and provide access to information on kidney and
urological diseases
* to support research
* to expand patient services
Our goal is to provide resources to the nephrology community that will assist
you in your day-to-day work. These initiatives of NKF cyberNephrology can
be found on our newly launched site: http://www.cybernephrology.org
We provide this web site for the purpose of rendering on-line services,
providing useful information and spreading knowledge.We hope that
this web site will help to improve the knowledge of all renal health
care providers, allied specialists, and all patients and their
families by enhancing the way we communicate and by helping us to
understand the ever expanding and ever changing field of renal
medicine. We strive to facilitate this by offering on-line
discussions and deliberations.
Under the "What's New" button at upper left on the site are five
resources, all totally free, that I believe you will find surprising, very
interesting,and practically useful in your everyday work regardless of what
area of nephrology you are in or how much exposure you have had to our
offerings in the past:
The first of these is the Schrier Atlas of Diseases of the Kidney.
This complete five volume work covering all of nephrology with 66
authoritative chapters by well know experts and excellent
illustrative material including full color images has received up to
120,000 hits on-line a month with up to 5600 unique visitors a month.
And that was before the recent addition of PowerPoint files for every
chapter! Now if you need to prepare a lecture in any area of
nephrology you can download the PowerPoint file for the relevant
chapter with all the illustrations and then add whatever text you
wish to the slide presentation in whatever language you wish and at
whatever level of presentation. If you are not sure exactly how to
do this please contact us for help. NKF cyberNephrology and the ISN
Informatics Commission held the worldwide electronic rights to this
product.
The second resource is the report on the July 2000 ISN ARF
Training Course in Kosovo and the image site for the just completed
Renal-Tech trip to Kosovo with hundreds of high resolution pictures
(suitable for use in lectures) taken by two of the participants Zina
Munoz, the director of Renal-Tech, and Dr. Wendy Brown, a
nephrologist who is past Chair of the National Kidney Foundation.
Renal-Tech/ISN/NKF cyberNephrology activities in support of
nephrology in Kosovo are part of an ongoing effort that included our
December 1999 visit
http://cnserver0.nkf.med.ualberta.ca/cn/Kosovo/Title.htm and
continues with the just completed visit of junior
nephrologist/nurse teams from Ghent, Belgium and Heidelberg, Germany
under the direction of Drs. Norbert Lameire and Eberhard Ritz. Wendy
Brown and transplant surgeon participant Dr. Mark Adams are
completing a report on nephrology in Kosovo for the World Health
Organization which we hope to have available soon.
Third, there is a fascinating transplant infectious disease case "Diagnostic
dilemma solved!", a microsporidia Encephalitozoon cuniculi case of Dr. Tim
Mathew with pictures.
Fourth for US nephrologists, an important HCFA Announcement (US-specific)
SPECIAL ALERT - Interim Process for Certain "Inpatient Only" Code Changes.
The fifth resource is an illustrated report I prepared for the
upcoming Fall 2000 ISN Newsletter entitled "Technology and the ISN
Informatics Commission/cyberNephrology'. As you might expect this
report contains a great amount of interesting detail concerning the
technologic future of nephrology, but what you may find more
surprising is that it also contains information about facets of the
technologic present which you are probably completely unaware of, as
well as human interest material regarding current cyberNephrology
activities and personnel. This resource is a 651 kB PDF file and
requires the program Adobe Acrobat Reader which you probably have
already but, if not, can download from:
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep.html
Three articles which appeared on the WWW just recently reinforce some of
the points made in the report:
Wireless connectivity
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2610173,00.html
Nanotechnology
http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stories/story/0,10738,2610573,00.html
http://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/08/09/dna/index.html
These ideas have reached the mainstream media as one can see from:
http://abcnews.go.com/onair/CloserLook/wnt000811_CL_manmachine_feature.html
Now, we solicit your ideas on how we can make
http://www.cybernephrology.org even more useful, in order to truly
deal with the subjects and issues that are important to you and
contain the resources you want to see made available. We ask that
you take the time to go through the site and reply to this email.
For the moment you can send suggestions to me as an Email message. In the
very near future we will have a questionnaire on the site itself which we
would like you to fill out to help us plan enhancements and improvements.
If you have any questions you can simply Email me at
kso...@cybernephrology.org or Kim....@UAlberta.CA. Please
thoroughly explore the site and come back often to see the changes
and new content.
Two operational facets that you may also wish to comment on: We have
designed http://www.cybernephrology.org so that the main page loads
very quickly even with a modem connection and looks very good even on
a cheap monitor with low end graphics card. The heavily accessed
Schrier Atlas is on a super-fast "fat pipe" server allowing for quick
downloads and has a very robust search engine which may be employed
in either simple or more complex mode. We welcome suggestions to
further fine tune these operational features.
Thanks for "listening" and I look forward to hearing from you!
Sincerely,
Kim Solez, M.D.
Director, NKF cyberNephrology
Chair, ISN Informatics Commission
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
kso...@cybernephrology.org
Kim....@UAlberta.CA
Phone: 780-407-2607
Fax: 780-407-2608
Home fax: 780-433-4652
http://www.cybernephrology.org