Morris F. Collen

Morris Frank Collen (November 12, 1913 - September 14, 2014) was a pioneering developer of computational systems for clinical and preventive medicine, prepaid group medical practice organization with information management for public health, and a founder of the field of medical informatics. He developed an innovative system for health screening and medical management of the Kaiser shipyard workers during World War 2, contributing significantly to the war effort. When subsequently computerized, Collen ‘s methods evolved into the first successful prototype for the organization of whole-patient healthcare data in Electronic Health Records (EHRs). Collen was an original partner in The Permanente Medical Group, and founder and Director of the Kaiser Permanente Medical Methods Research Division and its Division of Technology Assessment. Collen was a founder of the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI) and played a key role in founding the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA). He was Chair of the NIH’s National Library of Medicine (NLM) Board of Scientific Counselors and elected a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences - now the National Academy of Medicine of the USA. Collen was a prolific author, including books on Hospital Information Systems and Multiphasic Health Testing Services, and a comprehensive History of Medical Informatics in the USA.
==Biography==
Collen was born and grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, where his parents settled, having immigrated from Russia just prior to World War 1. He attended the Mechanics Arts High School in St. Paul, which led to his pursuing electrical and chemical engineering studies as an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota. During his final year there, his future wife Bonnie, who was a fellow-student pursuing her nursing studies, convinced him to follow up with an MD degree at the Medical School.. After a residency at Los Angeles County General Hospital, Collen joined his friend, the surgeon Sydney Garfield, who was a pioneer in the delivery of healthcare to large industrial workforces such as those building the Hoover Dam and the Colorado River Aqueduct, and together they became founding physicians in the Permanente Medical Group sponsored by Henry J. Kaiser, the prominent industrialist and shipbuilder. The group’s efforts in healthcare were initially focused on caring for the large number of employees of the Kaiser Industries shipyards on the US West Coast during World War 2. Continuous monitoring, with preventive and clinical healthcare for the shipbuilding workers was instrumental in their ability to deliver a virtually uninterrupted pipeline flow of the over 1,500 “Liberty Ships” that proved to be the critical transports for essential war materiel supplied to the Allied forces throughout the world. The medical group later expanded to become one of the first general medical group practices in the USA, pioneering preventive care through the methods of Multiphasic Screening developed by Collen initially for the shipyard workers - for whom he had developed, among others, treatment protocols for pneumococcal lobar pneumonia, which was highly dangerous before the time of antibiotics, and for which he introduced penicillin as soon as it became available. The Multiphasic Screening tests grew to include physical examinations, comprehensive laboratory and electrophysiological testing, x-ray imaging, and a self-administered medical history. Dr. Collen became Medical Director of the West Bay Division of Kaiser Permanente and Physician in Chief, San Francisco, while serving as Chair of the Executive Committee of the Permanente Medical Group for 24 years .
With data gathered over two decades at Kaiser Permanente from more than a million subjects, Collen helped develop processes for efficiently automating clinical healthcare, resulting in original operations research methods for health maintenance and data management, with the first prototype of a well-structured electronic health record. With the data, Collen organized and built a pioneering database for research in methods of preventive care, initially focusing on chronic diseases. Collen combined his engineering, operations research, and medical skills to adapt what were until then mostly business-oriented technologies for commercial computers to build unique computational clinical care and biomedical research resources for preventive medicine at Kaiser Permanente . This laid the foundations for what became computer-based informatics models which strongly influenced the development of hospital information systems, contributing to the shift from purely clinical to preventive medicine nationally and internationally . These in turn led the way to the more advanced medical information technology and informatics methods which helped scale up the provision of care and encouraged the reform of healthcare in the USA .
After retiring from active medical practice at Kaiser Permanente, Collen continued his work on research into medical informatics, automated multiphasic health testing (AMHT) systems, and preventive medicine. He was active in the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) , chairing its Medical Informatics Congress (MEDINFO) 1980 Tokyo Program Committee and promoting collaborations with other leaders in the field worldwide. He was instrumental in the founding of the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI) in 1984, establishing the first honorary college of Fellows for scholars and investigators in the interdisciplinary fields bringing together practitioners in medicine, nursing, and healthcare with mathematicians, statisticians, engineers, physicists, computer scientists and other life scientists working on clinical and biomedical informatics. In 1989 he helped found the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) by bringing together the former disparate professional organizations, including ACMI. In 1993 ACMI established an annual Morris F. Collen Award of Excellence, of which he was the first recipient . Collen continued to be a prolific author, and synthesized the advances and contributions of medical informatics in the book A History of Medical Informatics in the United States 1950- 1990 . He co-edited a substantially revised and updated version with Marion Ball which was published posthumously in 2015 
Collen established and secured the foundations for medical informatics in the US and helped nurture and lead its evolution for over 50 years. It is not surprising that in celebrating his 100th birthday in 2013 he was called “The Father of Medical Informatics”.
Category:1913 births
Category:People from St. Paul, Minnesota
Category:Pioneers
Category:Developer
Category:Founders
Category:2014 deaths