Healthy information

The UK's National Health Service (NHS) has incorporated Dialog as a lead information provider in the NHS's new extranet serving users in England. The NHS contract with Dialog has an initial phase of three years and will see up to 1.2 million health care professionals and administrators in England linked through the NHS extranet to information services supplied by Dialog. English universities and other teaching facilities also are now contracting with Dialog to access the Dialog customised content collection directly. The NHS extranet went live on 1 April 2003. Content being supplied by Dialog includes articles and reports aggregated from thousands of scientific, technical and medical sources from around the world, plus an e-linking feature that seamlessly takes users from document titles to online e-journals. NHS's choice of Dialog is part of the £4.8m National Core Content Project, which is designed to provide NHS staff and its constituents with online access to a core collection of key electronic knowledge resources. Other information vendors contracted by the NHS are ProQuest and BioMed.