On Oct. 1, 1996, the National Laboratory for the Study of Rural Telemedicine began work supported by the U.S. National Library of Medicine that continued until Mar. 31, 2000. The purpose of the project was to evaluate the effectiveness of five separate telemedicine applications in a rural setting.

This work was done in a rural test-bed network in eastern Iowa and was supported administratively by a Telemedicine Resource Center at the University of Iowa.