1997 Partnerships for Networked Consumer Health Information Conference

Summaries of Plenary Sessions and Breakout Sessions

Does it Work? #4: And the Winners Are...

Date: Wednesday, April 16, 1997
Time: 2:00 - 3:30 PM

Moderator: Jim Hake, Chairman of the NII Awards, Access Media, Inc.

Speaker: Karen A. Chapman, MD, MPH, Director, Center for Health Information, Division of Public Health, Georgia Department of Human Resources, "The Judging Process for the NII Awards"

Speaker: George Hripcsak, MD, Principal Investigator, Columbia University "Applied Informatics Project - Using the NII to Coordinate Health Care"

Speaker: David L. Rosenbloom, PhD, Project Director, Boston University, School of Public Health, "Join Together Online: Linking Communities Fighting Substance Abuse"

Statement of the Subject

The National Information Infrastructure (NII) Awards have been involved in the evaluation of innovative uses of the information superhighway since 1995. While many projects struggle with evaluation of their projects, the NII Awards have created a process that identifies and recognizes innovative leaders and thinkers who are realizing the promise that the infostructure holds. The NII Awards are creating a learning community of thinkers and doers that "get it."

Key Issues, Including the Role of Technology

The NII Awards program is an educational and market development initiative with an ulterior motive: to recognize and reward excellence in networked applications, namely projects and services that bring communities together through the infostructure and thereby show the world it can be done. The NII Awards believe that by recognizing the best real-world cyberspace projects, the barriers to widespread adoption of the technologies will be pushed down. This awards process is demonstrating that what people do given the power of networks can change our lives, and our world, for the better.

Roles, Responsibilities, and Priorities

The NII Awards process begins with a call for entries. There is a call for entry in 10 categories. The entries are qualified for the category and move to a selection phase where judges determine who will be a semi-finalist. Another round of judging narrows each category from 10 semifinalists to 6 finalists. The final judges review the 6 finalists in the 10 categories and a winner in each category is selected.

The categories are Arts and Entertainment, Business, Children, Community, Education, GII Next Generation, Government, Health, Public Access (sponsored by the U.S. Postal Service), and Telecollaboration (sponsored by AT&T).

There are three Judging Criteria that are weighed equally by the judges, and applied in the context of the Award Category Definition.

This session describes the judging process in detail. A 1996 Finalist Judge will describe the judging process and experience. Two finalists in the NII Award Category of Health, Applied Informatics-Using the NII to Coordinate Healthcare and Join Together Online-Linking Communities Fighting Substance Abuse, will share their innovative projects and the evaluation experience.

Next Steps

Continue the annual NII Awards process, providing a forum to highlight the best and the brightest in cyberspace.

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