History
Research has been a Kaiser Permanente focus since we began providing medical care during the Great Depression and World War II.
As early as the August 1942 dedication of the Permanente Foundation Hospital in Oakland, California, Henry J. Kaiser announced that one of the key purposes of the Health Plan was "...to provide funds for research."
The Department of Medical Research published its first article on aspirin’s analgesic effects on pain in 1946, and in 1951, one of the Health Plan’s founding members, Morris F. Collen, MD, initiated what was a revolutionary concept for the times – the multiphasic screening exam.
Multiphasic exams began as a response to a post-war shortage of physicians and then labor leader Harry Bridges’ desire that all members of the Longshoremen’s Union West be given annual check-up exams. Collen turned to Lester Breslow, MD, a young public health doctor who had published the results of an experiment named "multiphasic screening" that used technicians and lab workers to do blood testing, chest X-rays and other screening techniques. Following his lead, Collen was soon overseeing exams on 150 longshoremen a day in the Pier 18 union hall.
In the late 1950s, Sidney Garfield, MD, Kaiser Permanente’s founding physician, sent Collen to the first national conference on computers in medicine. It wasn’t long afterward that Collen began implementing the visionary ideas that would later have him named one of the fathers of the field now known as medical informatics.
In 1961, Collen established the Division of Research (originally called the Department of Medical Methods Research) and in 1962, the Division of Research received its first grant from the United States Public Health Service to automate the multiphasic exam. Three years later, the Health Plan’s Oakland and San Francisco clinics began offering automated multiphasic health testing (AMHT) to all members.
The AMHT led to the creation of electronic patient medical records. In the late 1960s, the Division of Research’s Edmund (Ted) van Brunt, MD, (who later succeeded Collen as Division of Research director) piloted a computer-based patient medical record system with a database that supported both patient care and health services research. By 1973, a computer medical record existed for all health plan members.
Those earliest records are still used in research today and they allowed the Division of Research to develop a data-based research agenda. For the first time, researchers could use computer-generated data to test their hypotheses, whether they were interested in adverse drug reactions, the efficacy of a medical treatment or other aspects of medical care. Today, the division’s rich clinical databases are unequalled and allow for population-based studies that cannot be done anyplace else in the world.