Advances in computing technology is the key to a superior coordination and collaboration among providers, agencies, caregivers, and families to integrate medical, health, mental health, social, and economic support services. Computing and information systems are constructed from increasingly powerful, mass-produced, inexpensive, small components: semiconductors, electronic packaging, circuit boards, disk drives, lasers, scanners, and displays. One consequence is the "digitization of all information industries and their convergence into a single information hardware sector based on a common set of digital component technologies." (Jones, R., and C. Wright. 1999).
Through this convergence, workstations bring together a number of digital technologies, including digital video. For the health care provider, the same workstation serves as a scanner, fax machine, video-conferencing port and telephone. The user's interaction is through keyboard, touch, pointer devices, and speech.
A wide variety of knowledge flow to these new workstations over high-speed networks. Many of the novel applications of information management and presentation we envision today presupposes an ability to intermingle video, movies, sound, print, and display; an ability that is founded on a shared, digital foundation. High-bandwidth networks, a prerequisite for the realization of this workstation vision, will be widely available within the next 10 years (Robinson, J., Shaver, P., & Wrightsman, L. 2000).
Already the national networking infrastructure is highly developed and serves as a foundation for a new kind of collaboration in the provision of health and social services.
The benefits of this infrastructure are already apparent in a wide range of scientific endeavors. Different scientific applications call forth different configurations of the underlying technologies to give users a dramatically more responsive information environment.
Internet and Developments
The centerpiece of the national networking infrastructure is the Internet, the descendant of the ARPAnet, an experimental network designed some 30 years ago by the Advanced Research Projects Agency........
