Electronic Health Records

January 5, 2009

Morris Collen, MD, Profiled in the Los Angeles Times and MedPage Today

The long and illustrious career of Morris Collen, MD, one of Kaiser Permanente's founding physicians, is highlighted in two recent profile articles in the Los Angeles Times and MedPage Today.

The profiles describe how Dr. Collen, 95, is still busy working at the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research in Oakland, which he founded four decades ago, to harness the power of KP HealthConnect™ and computers to improve health care.

The articles explain how Dr. Collen and the Division of Research are partnering with IBM to study drug interactions among elderly patients. Given that elderly people take up to 20 medications daily, Dr. Collen is working with IBM to crunch numbers on the world's most powerful super-computer and Kaiser Permanente's electronic health records to uncover evidence-based protocol for drug interaction for the elderly.

Dr. Collen has been a health care pioneer since the 1940s, when he developed new methods of saving pneumonia patients in Henry J. Kaiser's shipyards. In the 1950s, Dr. Collen launched the annual preventive health checkup that screened for chronic disease before symptoms appeared. In the 1960s, he established Kaiser Permanente Northern California's Division of Research, now known for its leading-edge studies. Also in the 1960s, Dr. Collen automated blood testing methods and created systems for storing the health checkup results. His groundbreaking work paved the way for KP HealthConnect™, which today is the world's largest civilian electronic health record.

The Los Angeles Times' piece, published Jan. 3 and titled "What's Up With This Doc? Oh, A Lot", recounts how Dr. Collen created Kaiser Permanente's first database in the 1960s, a repository of medical records on punch cards, mined for research purposes.

Read the profile stories in Los Angeles Times and MedPage Today, which published its piece Dec. 24.