Dr. Larry Weed '45 was featured in an article published in The Economist on December 10 titled "The computer will see you now" about his career-long goal of increasing the use of computers and technology to improve the efficiency of healthcare.
Dr. Weed's proposed reforms, which involve a far greater use of computers of doctors, have been met with opposition throughout his career because many doctors "cannot believe that their inability to retain today's vast medical knowledge in their heads is harming patients," said Dr. Weed. This opposition has not stopped Dr. Weed, as he has worked throughout his career to create programs that will increase efficiency in hospitals. As the Economist article says, "Dr. Weed, who turns 82 this month, is the embodiment of indefatigability, devotion and determination."
After graduating from Hamilton in 1945, Dr. Weed earned his medical degree from Columbia University in 1947 and completed his residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. In the 1950's, he changed the basics of health-care delivery with an innovation called the "problem-oriented medical record" or "POMRin."
POMRin was designed as a solution to the problem of doctors in hospitals dealing with multiple patients with multiple symptoms and messy record keeping. And, as the article points out, this is a problem that does need to be addressed. There is simply too much information in the medical field to absorb and retain; it is impossible to expect doctors to retain all of the information on some 12,000 known diseases in their heads. As a result, preventable medical errors kill between 44,000 and 98,000 people each year in America alone. POMRin, in which each problem is itemized and monitered, was an early attempt to curb these errors. "Saying that POMR was revolutionary almost understates it." Said Dr. Charles Safran, a professor at Harvard Medical School, "There's probably no one who has more fundamentally affected the way we organize our work than Larry Weed. He fundamentally changed American medicine."
In 1969, Dr. Weed received a government grant to build a minicomputer version of POMR known as PROMIS for use at the Hospital of Vermont. In 1982, he and his team formed the Problem-Knowledge Coupler Corporation (PKC) to create a new, PC-based version of the software. Today, the company employs a staff of 70 in Burlington, VT. PKC has built and continually updates software that couples patients' symptoms with the latest relevant medical information. "Doctors who have use PKC for years tell endless tales of improved office efficiencies, better patient involvement and diagnoses that they might otherwise have missed. A study from 2001 validates their experience, indicating that PKC's systematic approach can improve outcomes in chronic conditions such as diabetes," reports the Economist article.
Unfortunately, many doctors still believe that they do not need this technology to make diagnoses. So, for the time being, PKC is pursuing employers rather than health-care providers, as potential customers. A firm can invite its employees to access PKC online and share the results with their doctors. "It's impossible to keep up with the avalanche of knowledge," said Neil de Crescenzo, vice-president of global health care at IBM Business Consulting Services. "Therefore, it's important to use a valid diagnostic-decision aid like Larry's. As governments push for health-care automation, resistance to the use of IT could finally crumble."
-- by Laura Trubiano '07
