Healthcare Pioneers

Charles Barlow, vice president in charge of MCAUTO’s health services division, is a pioneer in healthcare data processing. He began his career in the healthcare field in 1948 as an employee of a major oil company that operated a 100-bed hospital in the West Indies. The early part of his business career included approximately 10 years of international assignments involving residencies in South Africa, Australia and the Middle East, as well as in the West Indies.

In the late 1950s, Barlow joined the professional staff of a large international engineering and management consulting firm headquartered on the East Coast where many of his consulting assignments were with hospitals and utility companies. In the early 1960s, Barlow became a strong proponent of the shared concept for automating hospital financial procedures.

Will nurses serve the computer or will the computer serve nursing? This may well be the question for nurses and the industry to answer in this decade.

Acceptance of computers in hospitals will be greatly influenced by whether nurses, the largest population in the healthcare field, accept them on friendly terms. That may depend on how well the industry helps nurses identify, define and meet the needs of nurses through computers.

The results of two recent surveys show that information professionals and top healthcare management remain cautious – and even pessimistic – over the speed with which a truly computer-based patient record will be implemented. Interest in open-systems solutions, however, is up sharply.

Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference attendees – 571 of them – stopped in the San Diego Convention Center hallway to take the fourth-annual HIMSS/Hewlett-Packard Leadership Survey. According to the response, the notion of reengineering information systems in healthcare has not caught on. Only 19 percent of respondents reported that the total quality-management movement had done anything to spur systems reengineering for increased productivity at their institutions.

Editor’s Note: When this article was published in the January 1990 issue of Computers in Healthcare, John Whitehead was president of TDS Healthcare Systems, which he formed in 1986 after acquiring it from Revlon Corp. An acknowledged advocate of applying information technology to improve the delivery of healthcare services, Whitehead also served as a member of National Institute of Health’s Environmental Health Services Advisory Committee. He was a director of the Whitehead Institute, a leading center for biological research founded by his family and based at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.

The healthcare industry changed forever on Oct. 1, 1983, when Congress imposed a new reimbursement system for hospitals that replaced the traditional cost-plus method of payment for expenses associated with Medicare patients with a prospective payment system. The new system, conceived to facilitate efficiency and competition, was built upon the concept of diagnosis-related groups and established fixed-hospital reimbursement based primarily on a patient’s diagnosis.

Editor’s Note: This is the fourth installment in our year-long 30th anniversary “Pioneers in Healthcare IT” celebration, featuring articles from past issues of Health Management Technology, formerly called Computers in Healthcare. This article appeared in the May 1990 issue. When this article was printed, David M. Pomerance was president of healthcare systems at Unisys, Charlotte, N.C.

The American healthcare system is based on the principle that healthcare is an inherent right of the people. The challenge we must meet as a nation is to provide access for all Americans to healthcare services that will improve the quality of life – at a price the country can afford.

This dilemma has forced many Americans to face difficult philosophical and ethical issues of access. With each advance in medical technology, the cost of sustaining life rises. Is everyone entitled to the ultimate in high-tech treatments, regardless of the cost and the anticipated outcome? We have to make some difficult choices. Changes in our attitude about the right to healthcare and changes in the healthcare system will be required.

Editor’s Note: When this article was published in August, 1985, in Computers in Healthcare, a previous name of Health Management Technology, Mary Elizabeth McIlvane was president of MEM Communications Group, Winter Park, Fla.

Most of the speakers at the Conference of Health Care Business Information Systems, held at the Dallas Infomart in May, focused on a common thread – the need for healthcare information systems vendors to help hospitals and alternate-care facilities executives in clarifying directions and determining information system requirements in a changing environment.

Editor’s Note: This is the second installment in our year-long 30th anniversary “Pioneers in Healthcare IT” celebration, featuring articles from past issues of Health Management Technology, originally called Computers in Hospitals. This article appeared in the March/April 1981 issue.

In the early 1970’s, a significant number of firms began to offer systems in response to the automation needs of laboratories; relatively few of these companies are extant today. One cause of this high attrition rate derived from the specificity of the early vendor-designed systems; they were often virtually "tailor-made" for individual hospitals; developmental costs were high, but system transportability often proved to be low.