Practical Operation of a Document Delivery System for University Hospitals and Its Evaluation

Abstract

 In past, the Ministry of Education delivered official documents printed on paper to each university hospital. We developed and now use a WWW-based, on-line official document delivery system for the university hospitals of UMIN (University Medical Information Network). This system authenticates users by ID and password, and provides documents as PDF images or files such as MS WORD, EXCEL, Lotus123, and Ichitarou. This system also has a full text search function for these documents. Notification of new document is sent to a mailing list of persons in charge at each university hospital, who forward the E-mail or notice to persons within their hospital. Our questionnaire research shows that 86% of users have a favorable impression of this system, mainly due to its convenience and quick document delivery. Most negative impressions are due to the users’ lack of skill and practice. We believe that network-based document delivery is very useful and efficient, and will become more popular in the near future.