N-1-1-020.15 Biomedicine, by Ted Shortliffe, Although late to join the Internet community, biomedical researchers and educators have been increasingly aggressive in their efforts to connect to the network and to articulate a vision of what national electronic connectivity and information access can mean to both the medical practitioner and the biomedical researcher. A recent report from the Institute of Medicine ("Computer-Based Patient Records: An Essential Technology for Health Care", National Academy Press, November 1991) has been particularly explicit about the need for an enhanced role of the biomedical community in national network planning. Most academic health science institutions are joined to the Internet via their main campus computing and communications facilities. This has left community hospitals and other nonacademic healthcare institutions with a limited understanding of the Internet and a simultaneous lack of models for how they might best get connected to their regional networks. The National Library of Medicine is hoping to address this problem as one aspect of its role in the national High Performance Computing initiative. To help address both the clinical and research uses of networking in biomedicine, the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) has identified "Broadband Networks, High Speed LANs and Multimedia" as one of the two tracks in its annual Spring Congress to be held at the downtown Marriott Hotel in Portland, Oregon from May 7-9, 1992 (the second track deals with Decision Support Systems in biomedicine). The program chairman for the networking track is Dr. Jerome Cox from Washington University (jrc@wucs1.wustl.edu) and more information about the meeting may be obtained from the AMIA Offices, 4915 St. Elmo Ave, Suite 302, Bethesda, MD 20814 (telephone 301/657-1291 or email to mutnik@lhc.nlm.nih.gov). Abstracts are due January 10, 1992 and the preliminary program will be available by March 1.