Lawrence Weed


Lawrence Leonard Weed was an American physician, researcher, educator, entrepreneur and author, who is best known for creating the problem-oriented medical record as well as one of the first electronic health records.

Biography

Born in Troy, New York, he graduated from Hamilton College and, later, the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1947 and pursued a career in academic medicine. He retired as an Emeritus Professor of the University of Vermont.

Career

Dividing his time between research, patient care and teaching, he developed a method which reorganized the structure of the medical record from being divided into the different sources for patient records to one structured around a well-defined list of a patient's medical problems.
He first published about the problem-oriented medical record in 1964, but a 1968 article published by the New England Journal of Medicine introduced the concept to a broader audience. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he gave lectures at medical schools around the country, and published a book that described the problem-oriented medical record in more detail.
Over 2,000 academic articles and numerous medical textbooks discuss Weed's problem-oriented medical record, and it has become a central component of medical and nursing education. His original idea for a patient problem list was adapted and put into law in the “meaningful use” requirements of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act, which promoted the adoption of electronic health records in the United States.
He also helped develop PROMIS, a computerized medical information system based on the problem-oriented record, which used a touch screen; introduced in 1969, that system was one of the earliest versions of an electronic medical record. He launched a company PKC, which developed methods for clinical information management systems. In 2012, the firm was purchased by Sharecare.

Honors

Weed was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in May 1972 and would later receive the Gustav O. Leinhard Award from the Institute of Medicine for his contribution of the problem-oriented medical record to the field of medicine. He was a founding fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics.