As policy-makers and provider organizations ponder and debate the future of Meaningful Use, let’s not forget that electronic health records are not something that suddenly appeared in the early 2000s. In fact, the history of medical informatics seems to predate the new millennium by 50 years.
I know this because publisher Springer has just released an updated version of a 1995 book, “The History of Medical Informatics in the United States, 1950 to 1990,” originally edited by Dr. Morris F. Collen. Collen, a founding member of the Permanente Medical Group in 1948, died in September 2014 at the age of 100, but not before finishing the update.
On the new version, Collen collaborated with nursing informatics veteran Marion J. Ball, now a senior advisor to IBM’s Healthcare and Life Sciences Institute. According to Kaiser Permanente, it was Collen’s dying wish to see this volume published.
Behavioral Health, Interoperability and eConsent: Meeting the Demands of CMS Final Rule Compliance
In a webinar on April 16 at 1pm ET, Aneesh Chopra will moderate a discussion with executives from DocuSign, Velatura, and behavioral health providers on eConsent, health information exchange and compliance with the CMS Final Rule on interoperability.
“His last words to me were, ‘Make sure that the book is published,'” Ball, professor emerita at Johns Hopkins University, said in a Kaiser Permanente article.
The story says that Collen attended a computing conference in New York in 1960, at the request of Kaiser founding physician Dr. Sydney Garfield. “[Garfield] thought the time had come for doctors to use computers in patient care,” Collen wrote.
That was 55 years ago. While Collen remarked on his 100th birthday, Nov. 12, 2013, that “everybody” has EHRs and that people can look up Kaiser records on smartphones, systems remain far from perfect.
The Permanente Medical Group as well as the Kaiser Permanente Northern California Division of Research, which Collen founded, will honor the book and Collen’s life at the American Medical Informatics Association meeting in San Francisco next week.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
AMIA also will present its annual Morris F. Collen Award of Excellence. At least one former AMIA board member named a cat after Collen.
Oh, by the way, former AMIA President and CEO Dr. Don Detmer said a few years back that he purposely accelerated the timeline in a 1991 Institute of Medicine report to create a sense of urgency in the healthcare industry.
Detmer was chairman of the IOM’s Board on Health Care Services, which wrote a treatise called “The Computer-Based Patient Record: An Essential Technology for Health Care” (1991, revised 1997). The report set a goal of replacing paper records within 10 years, even though the committee that wrote it thought it would take twice as long.
“I knew that it was probably unattainable,” Detmer said in 2010. Nearly 25 years after the IOM report, it’s still not reality, thus the need to update Collen’s historical review.
