by Bryan Culp
You may have heard the news this spring that every Kaiser Permanente medical facility is now equipped with KP HealthConnect®, this being the largest private sector integrated electronic health record implementation in the world.
What may come as a surprise is that KP has been for decades a leader in medical informatics, the theory, practice and “dynamo” behind today’s health e-connectivity.
Thirty years ago this year medical informaticians gathered in Tokyo, Japan, for the world congress “MEDINFO 80.” Medical informatics was then a young discipline, and Tokyo was the site of the third congress, the two previous congresses having convened in Stockholm (1974) and in Toronto (1977). KP physicians and informaticians participated in all three congresses. Among them was Dr. Sidney R. Garfield, KP’s founding physician, who delivered a paper at the first congress in Stockholm.
What made the Tokyo congress different? It was the first of the congresses to be organized by the new International Medical Informatics Association (IHEA), the formation of this mostly-European-in-membership, focused society from a parent organization of wider scope (the International Federation for Information Processing) was itself a sign that the field of medical informatics was developing its own identity.
Morris F. Collen, MD
Second, Tokyo was the first of the world congresses to have significant U.S. involvement. Kaiser Permanente’s Morris F. Collen, MD, a pioneer in the field of medical informatics, was the program chair and Donald A. B. Lindberg, MD, then at the University of Missouri at Columbia (currently the Director of the National Library of Medicine) was the editor of the conference proceedings. Participants from the United States delivered a total of 51 papers in Tokyo on subjects ranging from medical information systems and computer-based medical records to computer-aided diagnosis and clinical decision support.
By way of background, in 1980 there were two medical informatics associations in the United States with less than 500 members each: the Society of Computer Medicine (SCM) and the Society for Advanced Medical Systems (SAMS). Each convened separate annual meetings and each held board members in common. And because between the two there was some duplication of effort there grew within each the awareness that the profession in the United States would be served if the two merged.
At Tokyo, Dr. Marion Ball (then Director of Computer Systems at Temple University’s Health Sciences Center) and president-elect of SCM, and Dr. Ben Williams, the president of SAMS, formed an ad hoc meeting of members of their boards to discuss “common interests and possible common future activities.” Dubbed the “Tokyo Accords” by Williams, in these discussions lay the genesis of the American Medical Informatics Association.
The enthusiasm generated in Tokyo resulted in the First Congress of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA Congress 82) held in May 1982 in San Francisco. The congress was organized by Dr. Collen and was sponsored by the Kaiser Foundation Hospitals, with SAMS, SCM, and IHEA and other organizations acting as co-sponsors. Concurrently in the months preceding and following the congress, the American Medical Informatics Association grew with the expressed purpose “to advance the field of medical informatics in the United States.”
So when the Kaiser Permanente Thrive ad “Connected” airs on your local station, remember the medical informatics congresses that convened in Tokyo and San Francisco thirty years ago, and of the foresight of the KP leadership to promote and build-up the field of medical informatics.
Click on the arrow to watch “Connected.”
