Joseph Henderson, Director of Interactive Media Laboratory at Dartmouth Medical School, states, "lacking training and basic familiarity with information tools, many healthcare professionals have common reaction to the so called 'information revolution' and they can be overwhelmed."  The government has now assumed responsibility to help develop consumer information to identify opportunities for quality assurance processes for healthcare and mechanisms to deal with healthcare manpower issues.  Another goal of this effort is to enhance the ability of site visitors to share information with each other.

Following are examples of government sponsored web sites for individuals interested in healthcare:

National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR)
http://www.nidr.nih.gov/
As part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the NIDCR web site allows one to access topics such as:

The "program announcements" provide full text display of all announcements as well as e-mail links to NIDCR scientists responsible for each project.  Through web access to NIDCR databases, visitors can search and review current funded projects by investigator, state, project domain, grant number as well as review comprehensive summaries of funding to individual institutions.

National Library of Medicine (NLM)
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/
The NLM is the world's largest medical library and is located on the campus of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).  The NLM web site lists services provided locally and electronically.  It also lists funding opportunities and posts announcements of interest to visitors.  Links to special projects supported by NLM such as Telemedicine projects and the Visible Human Project (see below) are convenient for the visitor to the site.  Articles on standards related to data dictionaries are provided and several NLM publications can be accessed online.  Literature search capacity is provided through Grateful Med/MEDLINE, for users who have subscribed to this service.  Users can gain access through academic healthcare university libraries, or individuals can apply for an account online.  Public versions are also available (see PubMed).

MEDLINEplus Health Information
http://www.nln.nih.gov/medlinplus/
MEDLINEplus Health Information is a government resource containing quality information from the NLM.  The NLM staff evaluates thousands of web sites for their content and then creates multiple link sites within MEDLINEplus to provide an excellent search resource for both patients and healthcare professionals.  MEDLINEplus is an evolved version of the free web-based service of PubMed.  It is interesting to note that during the last few years, one-third of the visits to MEDLINE were by the public.  This web site contains multiple links to:  medical dictionaries, search engines/meta-directories for physicians, dentists and other healthcare providers.  These include hospitals and hospital organizations.  The site also serves as a "clearing house" for health information topics such as oral healthcare.  Access to the public version of MEDLINE is a part of the web site homepage.  Databases from the NLM, NIH and other government resources are also linked to this site.
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