I-Med is the Internet Medicine Company. Formed by physicians, health informaticists, network and telecommunication experts, we are uniquely qualified to design, implement and evaluate digital medical solutions. While our initial work focused on establishing a functional web presence for our clients, we have moved into the areas of telemedicine and virtual clinics, medical Internet publishing, web-based secure medical records, and CME over the Internet.

Our focus and our expertise lies in the marriage of the technical and marketing aspects of digital medicine, and therefore we have created this Internship/Externship opportunity for students interested in healthcare careers who have a desire to explore the role of information technology in medicine - the field of Medical Informatics. The majority of our company's projects rely on the Internet as the "backbone" for our clinical applications, though some of our projects deal with other telecommunication strategies.

We believe in what we preach, so we have added the "Externship" to our Internship program. The Externship will allow the student to participate in our company's operations and complete his/her project without working on the I-Med premises. This "tele-commuting" is one of the keys to becoming a technology adept professional, and we encourage students to consider some modification of the Intern-Externship to have this experience. Our project opportunities and responsibilities will vary with the time commitment our students can make.

I-Med, LLC was formed as a business in June 1996 and now consists of nearly twenty individuals the majority of whom bring superior technical expertise to I-Med by way of their other employment. Our company is broken into five divisions:

1. medical staff: This team consists of physicians and medical researchers with broad clinical experience in multiple surgical and medical disciplines. They serve as clinical liaisons and provide the design elements for our product line.
2. programmers: We have web site programmers competent in CGI, Perl, JAVA, JAVA Script, HTML 3.2, animation, and interactivity. They also have expertise in web-based database design, Internet security, and network telecommunications.
3. graphic design: Our creative talent is based upon the work of three artists with many years of experience in both digital and non-digital artwork. Their repertoire of skills continues to grow with every new design development on the web.
4. sales & marketing: Our marketing professionals with skills in online advertising, electronic commerce, search engine function, and digital publicizing are responsible for I-Med's Internet promotions. They ensure that all of our customers' sites remain high-traffic venues.
5. education: This group is responsible for after-sales support and customer education and training. They conduct seminars at all levels of technological sophistication for our customers to become acquainted with, or to upgrade their skills with the Internet.

The I-Med team will entertain any project suggestion from our interns, and would encourage them to develop their own ideas in discussion with a mentor from our company who will add relevance (clinical, technical, or marketing) to mesh the project with our company goals.

1. develop a technological model for healthcare delivery in a specific setting - this will cover Intra/Extranet technology and clinical applications in specific healthcare settings; the student will be immersed into a clinical setting and will gain an understanding of implementation issues in the clinical setting;
2. design the technological model for a "paperless" journal - this is our most ambitious project for a long-term intern only; this project will establish a company template for implementing web-based medical journals;
3. evaluation and performance tools for digital healthcare delivery - the student will learn about the clinical field of Outcomes Assessment and help create a benchmark for its application to healthcare;
4. improve our current electronic patient record database integration - the student will review standard web database technologies and help determine the means by which clinicians extract data from both paper and electronic charts;
5. implement a simple online healthcare newsletter model - the student will help develop a program which allows the user to create/update a newsletter online without programming knowledge; this will be an extension of an ongoing effort;
6. optimize the automated search engine submission tools - the student will learn about robot/web-bot technology by reading research reports on search engines and will help develop improvements to the model;
7. learn basic and advanced HTML coding;
8. develop simple and advanced digital graphic design skills;
9. participate in healthcare setting sales and marketing meetings;
10. any other project discussed with an I-Med team mentor.

We have an extensive library of research reports in all of the active fields of digital healthcare and the Internet. From this we will create a series of weekly reading lists which will correlate with the task lists from the intern's project. These learning objectives will be flexible to accommodate the intern's interests and time commitment.