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Access to Resources for Community Health (ARCH), a health information outreach project funded by the National Library of Medicine's regional outreach award, was established in December 2000 to improve access, especially electronic access to high quality health information and resources in four underserved communities northeast of Boston. Massachusetts General Hospital operates a community healthcare center in each of these four communities. The four communities (Charlestown, Chelsea, Everett, and Revere) are home to approximately 140,000 people. Many residents are new immigrants living below the federal poverty lines. Lack of access to high quality health information and resources was identified as a barrier to making sound healthcare decisions in these communities. Increasing community access to information on wellness, disease prevention and management was one of the key factors affecting overall improvement in health status of these communities.

ARCH is a collaboration among four original partners, MGH Community Health Associates, MGH Treadwell Library, Greater Boston Center for Healthy Communities, and the City of Chelsea Health Department. The four partners created a user-friendly web site (www.arch-mgh.org) linked to pre-selected health information on the Internet so people from the target communities could be protected to some extend against low-quality information. Both MedlinePlus and PubMed were selected for linkage in the ARCH web site. Subsequently, ARCH provided training to help people develop necessary skills in using the site effectively.

We have done numerous presentations and training sessions reaching hundreds of people in the communities over the course of two years. In 2002 alone we taught up to 30 one-on-one and small group classes with an average of training length being at least 1.5 hours long. Our web site now receives nearly 2000 hits per month. In addition to outreaching to the communities, ARCH also leads Patient Education Initiative for MGH HealthCare Centers. The Initiative serves as a centralized system to identify, acquire, and disseminate resources needed by each healthcare center. It publishes a quarterly inventory listing new resources available at ARCH including resources in foreign languages and assists health care centers upon requests in organizing and displaying patient education information. Community response to ARCH has been extremely positive and encouraging. Many clinicians feel better supported after using ARCH services, especially the service that helps them find materials in foreign languages and those written in easy-to-read English. Patients who received ARCH web site training finds many web pages, such as Interactive Health Tutorials from MedlinePlus, very useful in helping them better understand their conditions or in reinforcing what they already know about a disease. Our two-year experience with ARCH seems to suggest that provision of free access (space, computer, and online connectivity) and training (skills) is an effective strategy to address the issue of lack of access to high quality health information in the target communities.

Article submitted by Ming Sun, Mass General Hospital