Dialog, UA Faculty and Staff News

Dialog Online, UA Faculty & Staff News

UA Gets Health Care Intellectual Property, Plans Conference

by Bill Gerdes

Dr. Grant Savage

When former President Clinton made health care reform a priority for his administration, he and others in his administration envisioned a national information system that would allow all components of health care to share information.

Aside from some small-scale attempts, however, little has been done in the way of forging a cohesive, networked health care system, according to Dr. Grant Savage, Richard Scrushy/HealthSouth Chair and Professor of Health Care Management at UA’s Culverhouse College of Commerce and Business Administration.

"There are a number of reasons information technology has not progressed in health care," Savage said. "Cost, competition, politics, privacy - all come to mind. But we have reached the point that consumer complaints about health care delivery practically dictate that we seriously look at how information technology can alleviate some of the problems in health care."

So it was indeed serendipitous when a Savage acquaintance from the past contacted him with an idea. The contact was Dr. Leo van der Reis, M.D., whom Savage had known when he taught health care management at Texas Tech University.

Van der Reis, now an adjunct professor in health care at UA, is director of the Quincy Foundation for Medical Research, a charitable trust in San Francisco. The Quincy Foundation, a not-for-profit organization, has been conducting research for the past 10 years on issues of concern to physicians and other health care professionals, particularly the standardization of information technology across health care.

Van der Reis and Savage worked out a plan to transfer the intellectual property of the Quincy Foundation to the healthcare management program at UA, and the publications, records and other material are now stored at the Angelo Bruno Business Library.

Savage said the strength of the University’s management information systems program was a major consideration in planning to locate the Quincy Foundation’s intellectual property at UA, as was the strength of the information technology and health care sector in Birmingham.

A Conference in the Planning Stages

Savage and van der Reis are developing preliminary plans for hosting a major conference on the role of information technology in health care in 2002. The result of the conference would be a comprehensive report on the needs of the U.S. health care community. Current plans call for the conference to have two phases, a preparatory phase in March and a second phase in the fall.

Van der Reis said that he and Savage have met with representatives from the Office of the Secretary of Health and Human Services in Washington, D.C., to discuss this conference to standardize information technology in health care.

"At the present time, it is a veritable mess," van der Reis said. "We have thousands of systems and subsystems working independently.

"At the initial conference meeting, 10 people from academia and 20 from industry will sit down to work out the necessary outlines and agenda so that at the time of the second session, people will be ready to prepare the formulations and the protocols for the standardizations."

He said white papers would come out of the first session for use by the 100 or so participants in the second session.

"We already have received considerable expressions of interest and support and have received commitment of a matching grant for $100,000," he said. "We will have sponsors coming from private enterprise."