First

Good day. May you live in interesting times. A blessing or a curse. Either way, here we are.

In 1979, when I arrived at Indiana University, I met with a freshman advisor in Computer Science. The discussion centered on how I was going to apply my computer science degree. I explained my vision for the use of computers in medicine – broader range of medical devices to collect and assess health status, databases to store patient registration information to ease patients’ arrival at emergency rooms and inpatient areas, and longitudinal tracking of test results. The advice I received was to alter my study track to lead me to medical school. “No doctors will talk to you unless you go to medical school.”

I thought this was short sighted. Even then, before the PC, when computer programming was done with punch cards, I believed that we had adequate computing power and tools to tackle medical data.

In 1983, after graduating, I pursued my objective of working in the healthcare field. I answered an advertisement in the newspaper and met a physician with a similar vision. Dr. Joseph Flaherty at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine saw that if one could process, analyze and control the data, advances could be made. He and a colleague, Dr. Moises Gaviria, had a research grant and brought me on to analyze research data sets. The responsibilities gradually grew to include working with medical students and residents on research projects. And, with very limited technology by today’s desktop standards, I built a database to house diagnosis and medication information on patients in an outpatient psychiatric clinic. Once entered, the database would take the information and calculate when the next set of lab tests was required for those medications and alert the clinician. I wrote about this computer program and presented the information at the Ninth Annual Symposium on Computer Applications in Medical Care (SCAMC) in 1985.

It was there that I met Dr. Jill Anderson, a nurse. Jill taught me my first lessons about nurses and together we explored the use of computers, the requirements for security and confientiality, and the clinician user experience. She remains a patient teacher and an avid user of technology.

Since that time, I have worked in many areas of health care to improve operations and deploy computer applications in a health care environment. Along the way, people have provided me opportunities to help solve problems in patient care, clinical research, academic medicine, health care reform initiatives, and regulatory environments.

I don't practice medicine, but I learn every day more about how medicine is practiced. We have more computing power, tools, and smart people working on all aspects of health care - diagnosing and curing diseases, improving the patient experience, and adding dimensions for clinicians. These are indeed interesting times.