by Robert W.
In the early 1960s, I was a member of an
R&D team in Sunnyvale assigned to adapt our leading-edge computer systems'
knowledge to non-defense work. Our focus was on hospital information systems.
We teamed with El Camino Hospital in Mountain View, California, to be our Alpha
Site. Our goal was to automate all possible manual information handling
systems. At that time, almost all of these systems were labor intensive, paper-based
and error prone.
I was an industrial engineer assigned to
identify those manual systems that could be transferred to computer operation
and, thus reduce hospital labor expenditures, communication errors and patient
lengths of stay. These goals were achieved, with major cost savings results and
improvement in patient care and safety.
The developed system was installed during
the ensuing years in hospitals all over the United States and in Europe. My job
was to perform cost benefits studies for potential customer hospitals to
showing major savings.
The Lockheed system was many years ahead
of its time. The Government is now calling for improved information systems in hospitals
as a major way of reducing national health care costs.
