August 9, 2004
Nicaragua MIC Installation

WiRED International, on August 6, 2004 opened the doors to the second of its Medical Information Centers (MIC) in Leon, Nicaragua. The ribbon cutting launched a seven-station electronic library that will be used by several hundred faculty and medical students at the Centro de Salud de Sutiava Clinic. This teaching facility serves thousands of people, many of them Indians, in Nicaragua's second largest city located 25 miles from the Pacific Ocean. The project was sponsored by the Tiburon-Belvedere Rotary Club of California, Rotary International and the Rotary Club of Leon.

WiRED's first MIC in Leon, installed a year ago at the Heodra Hospital, was also supported by local, regional and International Rotary organizations. For both Centers, Rotary has provided funding for the computer hardware and software, equipment installation and some operating costs to augment the contributions of the local hospital and medical school.

The libraries at the Leon Medical School and teaching hospitals, like the libraries in hundreds of medical facilities worldwide, are out of date; rising journal costs have put current information out of reach as well. As comprehensive print libraries are increasingly impractical, computer-based libraries are beginning to fill the information void in many locations. WiRED has become a major player in providing medical e-libraries to hospitals and medical schools in third-world and post-conflict regions.

The Medical Information Center at the teaching clinic in Leon, as in most of WiRED's Centers, is outfitted with an e-library of CD-Roms that provides a quick infusion of the latest information. As the Internet becomes locally available, WiRED arranges access to proprietary medical Websites. Most recently, we have been connecting schools to the World Health Organization's HINARI database along with many other medical collections. Internet information eventually trumps the CDs in quantity and currency of information and becomes the information mainstay for most schools.

In the year ahead, WiRED is planning to install additional Centers in western Nicaragua and southern Honduras.

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