How We Got HereAntecedents

to the Electronic Medical Record

Catherine Arnott Smith, PhDUniversity of Wisconsin, Madison

School of Library & Information Studies

“Note- Every time we do one of these damn

things, some other obstacle to success presents

itself, and these obstacles are those that

cannot be fore-seen from animal experimentation

alone. But we’ll get ‘im yet!”

Financial ledger

Beginnings

• 1965: Hospital and clinic information systems (73)• Computer-assisted diagnosis (51)• Medical document storage and retrieval (28)

• Collen, 1986

Flash forward

• Goals very similar!• Eliminate paperwork• more keyboard use

• “Correlate diseases” and eliminate errors• knowledge bases have to be good and accurate

Works consulted

• Collen MF: Origins of medical informatics, In Medical informatics [Special Issue]. West J Med 1986 Dec; 145:778-785• The Bertram M. Bernheim Collection. The Alan Mason Chesney

Medical Archives of The Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions.• The Corset X-Rays of Dr Ludovic O’Followell (1908). Images courtesy

of the Wellcome Library, London. • Patient Room, New Orleans Marine Hospital. Images from the History

of Medicine, National Library of Medicine (public domain).