Personal health records: empowering consumers.

By empowering consumers, electronic personal health records (ePHRs, more commonly PHRs) will play a key role in the evolving electronically enabled health information environment. Consumers want to be more engaged in their own healthcare and are seeking out information online. Despite intense concerns about confidentiality and security, they have high expectations for electronic health information.

Promoting health and improving health care in a cost-effective manner through a military digital library.

Objective: The Virtual Naval Hospital (VNH) is a digital library designed to meet the information needs of U.S. Navy medical professionals.

The Virtual Naval Hospital: the digital library as knowledge management tool for nomadic patrons.

Objective: To meet the information needs of isolated primary care providers and their patients in the US Navy, a digital health sciences library, the Virtual Naval Hospital, was created through a unique partnership between academia and government.

Methods: The creation of the digital library was heavily influenced by the principles of user-centered design and made allowances for the nomadic nature of the digital library's patrons and the heterogeneous access they have to Internet bandwidth.

Results: The result is a digital library that has been in operation since 1997, continues to expand in size, is heavily used, and is highly regarded by its patrons.