Kelli Rosenthal, MS, RNC, CRNI, CANP, President and CEO stated; "We are positioning ResourceNurse™.Com to become the central distribution point for continuing education and nursing information. Our current plans call for 800 contact hours of CE programs to be online by the end of the first year”. ResourceNurse™.Com’s mission is to become the world’s leading provider of accredited, Internet-based continuing nursing education, and will also offer a portal to other nursing content on the World Wide Web, including a health-care focused search engine, career services, professional e-mail service, health-care related news feed, specialty focused threaded discussion groups, and links to all manner of other nursing sites so nurses can obtain the professional information they need in an efficient and easy way.

ResourceNurse™.Com’s market consists primarily of the 2.8 million nurses in the U.S. with Internet access at home or at work. Presently, some 1.7 million RNs require continuing education in order to maintain their licenses and/or specialty certifications.

The evolving shortage of RNs has left staffing levels critically low, and nurses are often unable to take time away from their jobs to participate in off-site CE programs. Rosenthal continued: “ Because the population is aging, patients are more acutely ill, and nurses are more stressed than ever for time, the Internet seems the best means of delivering the education and other professional information nurses need, all in one place, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.”

Several companies are involved in the production of ResourceNurse™.Com. Multi-Media Design, Inc. located in Newburgh, Indiana is the primary designer and programming group of the site with Beware of Dog Communications of New York City providing graphic design services. The site will feature original photographs of actual nurses in action by noted photographerDebra Rothenberg, known for her portraits of Bruce Springsteen and the Dalai Lama. ResourceNurse™.Com will be hosted by World Connection Services/Community Telephone of Evansville, Indiana.

"A great deal of planning and thought has gone into how ResourceNurse™.Com will look and feel", said Rick Williams, President of Multi-Media Design. "We wanted ResourceNurse™.Com to feel intuitive and comfortable to nurses. There is a lot of technology involved, from slide shows to streaming audio and video presentations, but we absolutely did not want that technology to get in the way of the primary purpose behind ResourceNurse™.Com, and that is providing continuing education programming to nurses. A nurse using the site should never have to worry about things going wrong; our goal all along has been to make it as simple as pointing and clicking and having everything work!"

Although there are other web sites with a nursing focus, none have concentrated on consolidating the fragmented nursing CE market, nor have any aggressively branded themselves to become the primary source of nursing education and information on the web: "Building an online nursing community is what this is all about", said Ms. Rosenthal. "Nurses do better professionally when they can easily network with other nurses, that is why we are providing over thirty specialty practice area discussion groups. That is why the top nursing experts write our programs. These are the same people that speak at the major conferences, conferences, which cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars to attend. We are bringing them and their expertise to every nurse with a computer and an Internet connection."