New
Guy

January 15, 2015 -- In the 70s and 80s, UCSF was a leader in Medical Informatics. My department there, called Section on Medical Information Science, did groundbreaking work. For example, my master's thesis was an electronic medical record -- one of the first -- that I built from the ground up, and deployed and tested in a live setting, UCSF's Dermatology Clinic. It worked fine!

Perhaps the most important work being done in our Section at that time was the development of medical terminologies, lead by our Chairman, Dr. Marsden Scott Blois. With his passing in 1988, our Section lost its funding that had come primarily from the National Library of Medicine. Many of our faculty and graduates defected to Stanford where a growing bioinformatics department picked up the leadership ball.

Today's news signals new hope for retaking our rightful leadership position. With the hiring of Dr. Butte (pronounced "beaut" as in "beautiful") and the reconstitution of our Section under the name "Institute for Computational Health Sciences," UCSF stands to resume its premier position in this area.

My concern is that amid the flurry of buzzwords -- "big data", "bioinformatics", "genomics", "precision medicine" -- we not lose sight of the central part of our mandate, clinical care. An essential tool for clinical care is the electronic medical record. Though in the last few years (driven especially by the incentives of Obamacare's Meaningful Use) this technology has become widely deployed, we are still not very good at it. It is not mature. There is much work that remains to be done, and it is my hope that much of it will be done at UCSF.

I mentioned this when I recently met with Dr. Butte. He agreed. This could be the "re-dawning" of an important era at UCSF. Welcome Dr. Butte!

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