Before the Beatles, EHR Mania

They say everything old is new again, but who would have thought that included electronic health records?

The New York Times recently unearthed what might have been the first attempt to digitize health records -- half a century ago. A press release from Feb. 18, 1962, trumpeted a partnership between IBM and the Akron Children's Hospital that involved clinicians recording patient information into a big computer at the nurses' station.

The press release "has a decidedly familiar ring," Steve Lohr wrote in the paper's Bits blog. "Doctors and nurses were buried in paper. Indeed, a study at the Ohio hospital found that one patient may 'generate as many as 50 types of documents requiring clerical work by nurses.'"

Lohr writes that the 1962 press release quotes hospital Administrator Roger Sherman as saying, "If we can mechanize much of this routine clerical work, our doctors and nurses will be able to spend more of their time using their professional training to give more direct and attentive care to patients."

Two years later Sherman reported the initiative resulted in "the kind of quality-of-care improvements that are selling points for today's electronic health records, like monitoring drug dosages and preventing harmful drug interactions," Lohr writes. Sherman's comments came in a video report now available via YouTube.

The outcome of the Akron experiment appears to be lost to time, according to Lohr.