Did you catch any of the news stories about the researchers who reported that elevated cholesterol levels in midlife significantly increase the risk of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia later in life? This was a collaborative piece of work by researchers from Kaiser Permanente and the University of Kuopio in Finland. And I’ll I bet you didn’t know that it was only possible because they could track almost 10,000 patients over four decades because of some of the earliest computer medical records in history!
Let me share the back story.
Recently, my colleague, Bryan Culp, and I got to spend an afternoon with Dr. Lester Breslow. He is the great public health leader in California who invented the “multiphasic exam” after World War II. The idea was to develop and use mass screening techniques to improve public health. He later became director of the California State Department of Public Health and served as dean of the School of Public Health at UCLA.
Dr. Breslow shared his memories of how an illustrious Permanente physician and classmate from the University of Minnesota Medical School, Dr. Morris F. Collen, adapted the “multiphasic exam” for use with thousands of longshoremen who joined Kaiser Permanente in 1951. Within a year, the exams were being expanded to other patients.
But the big news came in 1963-64 when, with partial support of a grant from the U.S. Public Health Service, Dr. Collen replaced paper records with a computerized “automated multiphasic screening program” that provided a total of a half million examinations in its first decade. Those were among the first computerized medical records in history and have been providing important long term medical information for researchers for more than four decades.
So, how does that relate to the new study? Well, the research findings came from tracking the medical data of members of Kaiser Permanente’s Northern California Region from 1967 to 2007 by using those very multiphasic testing records pioneered by Dr. Collen, who is widely regarded worldwide as pioneer of the field of medical informatics.
–Tom Debley
Great post thx!