Dr. Edward Shortliffe, on the History and Future of Biomedical Informatics
Last week I had the opportunity to hear and meet Dr. Edward Shortliffe at the New York Academy of Medicine. He’s a maven in the field of biomedical informatics (that would be the “other” BMI), and a pioneer at that. He mentioned that he began working on an electronic health record (EHR) when he was an undergraduate at Harvard in 1968.
Shortliffe emphasized the multidisciplinary nature of the field – that clinicians and computer science-oriented types need be involved for health information technology (HIT) to be effective. “Human health is at the core of it,” he said. The goal of biomedical informatics isn’t for computers to replace humans, he said, but for doctors to learn how to use it – as a tool – so that we (human doctors) can practice better medicine.
He reviewed the 50-year history of the field. The super-simple summary goes something like this: in the 1960s hospitals developed early information systems; in the 1970s, early decision support and electronic health records (EHRs) emerged at hospitals and large institutions; in the 1980s clinical research trials led to databases involving patients across medical centers; in the 1990s, progress in science (especially genetics) led to modern biomedical informatics. Now, the vast work includes clinical, imaging, biology (molecular, genomic, proteomic data) and public health.
Clinical informatics is the newest field supported by the American Board of Medical Specialties. The first boards will be offered in October of this year, he mentioned.
If you’re interested in the future of health IT, as I am, you might want to take a glance at a perspective published recently by Dr. Shortcliffe and two coauthors, Putting Health IT on the Path to Success, in JAMA. The authors consider the slow pace of implementing HIT, and suggest that the solution rests with patient-centric Health Record Banks (HRBs):
“…Health record banks are community organizations that put patients in charge of a comprehensive copy of all their personal, private health information, including both medical records and additional data that optionally may be added by the patient. The patient explicitly controls who may access which parts of the information in his or her individual account.
I’d like to see these emerge.
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