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October 29, 1997

Washington Hears Testimonials
On Program to Connect the Masses

By JERI CLAUSING Bio
WASHINGTON — Children on a poor, remote Indian reservation being able to travel the world via the Internet. Elderly shut-ins in rural Kansas avoiding nursing home life with daily video checkups. Inner-city housing project residents with online access to preventive care information from a nearby medical school.


Illustration: Nicole Schooley / CyberTimes
Such projects, the outgrowth of the Clinton Administration's program to bring the information superhighway to all of America, were the focus of a daylong conference, “Networks for People,” Tuesday at the Department of Commerce.

The conference was hosted by the department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration to showcase and share the experiences of projects financed by the Telecommunications and Information Infrastructure Assistance Program, which was initiated after President Clinton took office five years ago.

The program has become the most competitive grants program in the federal government, according to NTIA, with more than 900 applicants for $20.9 million in matching funds this year. Fifty-five public and nonprofit groups in 38 states and the District of Columbia were selected. Since 1994, the Commerce Department has awarded $100 million to 332 such projects in all 50 states, and those projects have brought in more than $150 million in matching funds.

The high-level of interest in the program was evidenced by the 700 registrants and the 400-plus people packed into the department’s conference room to hear past award winners talk about how they have used technology to improve lives and their communities.

Law enforcement officers from Munhall, Pa., and Murray City, Utah., recalled how they have used the grants to increase the number of and access to databases they need to identify and catch criminals.

In Kansas, the Hays Medical Center is using telecommunications to have daily two-way television contact with homebound and elderly patients.

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Among those listening was Carolyn Ennis of the Saint Vincent Foundation in Billings, Mont., which won a $465,000 grant this year to take telemedicine even farther. Her foundation, which runs the Saint Vincent Hospital, intends to incorporate technology into telemedicine to allow emergency room doctors to treat patients hundreds of miles away on the Crow Indian reservation, where there is just one nurse and no doctors.

The project will use the Telemedicine Instrumentation Pack, which is a small, hand-held diagnostic system that transmits pictures of a patients body parts using video teleconferencing.

“The nurse can put it in a patient's ear, and show the condition of the inner ear to the emergency room doctor, who then can say ‘wash it out’ or ‘bring the patient in,’ ” said Ennis, who said she was attending the conference to learn from other communities that have been involved with the program.

Ennis said that Saint Vincent would be able to sustain the program beyond the first year but that it would never have been able to buy the equipment and actually launch it without the federal grant.

Projects are selected, in part, for their ability to serve as models that can be replicated.

“We are setting up small laboratories all over the country,” said Larry Irving, assistant Commerce Secretary and the director of NTIA. “We are learning how technology can help to overcome geographic and financial barriers, improve public safety and enhance organizations' abilities to serve their communities.”

Although there are a number of technology grants in federal government, Irving said that the Telecommunications and Information Infrastructure Assistance Program has become the most competitive because it includes several disciplines — law enforcement, education, health and welfare. “It's not about what people in Washington think is important,” Irving said. “It's what communities need.”

In Newark, N.J., it started with concern that an unusually high number of children from the low-income New Community housing development were having trouble in school because they were often sick. At the same time, census data showed that people from the neighborhood, which is near the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, were being admitted at unusually high rates for services that would be unnecessary with appropriate primary care or could be dealt with more efficiently in clinics or doctors’ offices.

So Pamela Morgan, project coordinator for the Newark Public Schools, secured a grant from the assistance program to install computers at the Newton Street School and in the homes of neighborhood captains. The participants can go online to share information on community services, to get e-mail, to ask health questions or to use the Internet for school research.

Since launching the project, New Community neighbors have held forums dealing with AIDS, lupus, asthma and the common cold. In one chat group, doctors talked about the importance of exercise, and a group of neighbors formed a walking group.

The program has been dubbed “Making Healthy MUSIC,” which is a play on the “Multi-User Session in Community” software it uses: technology developed by Dr. Alan Shaw of the MIT Media lab.

The project has blossomed. Women, men, children and young fathers have all formed discussion groups, a new community center was built as the result of on-line communications, and one of the “captains” recently went back to school to hone word-processing skills.

“We thought we would put community people in touch with medical people and each other to explore health issues,” Morgan said. “But the project has mushroomed into an all-encompassing community revitalization project.”

In other areas, the programs have focused strictly on connectivity. One of the initial grants was awarded to the Ignacio Public Schools and Fort Lewis College to bring the Internet to the Southern Ute Indian Tribe in remote southwest Colorado.

Aaron Torres, who administers the Ute system, said there now were about 450 Internet users on the reservation, and the tribe hoped to eventually get involved in long-distance learning.

“It is promoting economic development; it is increasing communications with the outside world,” Torres said. “The kids use it a lot. A lot of these kids have never been anywhere. At least with the Internet they can look at a museum.”

While Irving says that the program is the pride of his tenure at the Commerce Department, he readily admits it has a long way to go before reaching the goal of connecting every community that wants to be brought online.

“I am a product of New York public schools,” he told the audience. “It is both a source of embarrassment and consternation that of the three schools I went to, not one child, not one day a year, has Internet access.”

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Jeri Clausing at jeri@nytimes.com welcomes your comments and suggestions.


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