What Larry Weed Understood About The Medical Profession: A Remembrance

There are courageous innovators in medicine who question conventional wisdom without fear. Dr. Larry Weed—who sadly passed away at the age of 93 on June 3, 2017—was one of those individuals. His ideas were fresh and important. From my perspective, he was one of the first to really recognize the power of the way that we organize information and its importance to the quality of care we deliver. By the time I met him, he was already an icon for his work organizing medical notes and providing the common structure that we use today. He was also one of the first to recognize our inefficient ability to translate knowledge into practice. I remember Dr. Weed’s metaphor in which he compared inconsistent knowledge translation in the medical field to electrical lines that experienced drops in voltage due to inefficient transmission. Long before everyone was talking about implementation science, he was already writing eloquently about how poorly and non-systematically medicine moved knowledge from academic papers to the bedside. I met Dr. Weed through my work with a group that was conducting an independent evaluation of whether one of his key projects—the Problem Knowledge Couplers—was applicable to the military. His idea was that physicians generally process complex information poorly, which conspires against their ability to make accurate diagnoses in complicated cases. He wanted to automate the process and, before most people thought about using computers to f...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - Category: Health Management Authors: Tags: Featured Health Professionals Quality larry weed Source Type: blogs