HEALTHCARE COMPUTING SALUTES A PIONEER

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by Mark Hagland
Last November, Jean-Raoul Scherrer, M.D., Ph.D., became the first non-American to be given the Morris F. Collen Award of Excellence by the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI). Granted annually by the ACMI, the prize is one of healthcare computing\'s highest and goes to a person who has "shown leadership and made significant contributions to medical informatics." In presenting the award to Scherrer in a special ceremony in Los Angeles, Charles Safran, M.D., entrepreneur and noted clinical professor, Harvard Medical School, Boston, said that Scherrer\'s work "lights up the field for all of us who follow."
A native of Geneva, Scherrer has both a medical degree and a doctorate from Swiss universities, and he also spent several years studying and doing research in the United States.
In 1971, while at the Geneva University Medical School (where he became a full professor in 1979), Scherrer was the leader of an extensive hospital informatics system development initiative called DIOGENE. Among the most creative projects of the time, it eventually led to one of the first extensive hospital-based, distributed-architecture clinical information systems of its kind. Even more significant, Scherrer\'s informatics work supporting genetics research led to his role in founding the Health on the Net (HON) Foundation (http://www.hon.ch), an organization that links clinical databases worldwide to aid research and of which he\'s now president.
"The idea of HON was initially to access scattered databases regardless of where they might be located in the world," Scherrer says. "We started by linking just six databases, rapidly went up to 12, and then it went up from there. And we realized how effective it was to access so many remote databases without having to copy what you wanted to access." Scherrer says it was so successful in molecular biology and genetics that he and his colleagues decided to do the same thing with medical and health issues. Thus, they found themselves at the leading edge in developing Internet sites for clinical research capabilities.
HON made Geneva a center for medical Internet research and development in the early 1990s--a time when few outside academia or the U.S. government or military had even heard of the Internet, Scherrer notes. Evolution was so rapid that a few years after initial funding from the local Geneva canton, HON was made a federal institution in Switzerland, with full federal funding (a somewhat unusual distinction considering the foundation\'s type of activity, Scherrer notes). That last step required some personal cajoling of Swiss lawmakers, Scherrer recalls. According to those who know him, that\'s where leadership came in.
Scherrer is "a combination of a visionary, a scientist and a politician, and that combination has allowed him to have phenomenal success," says Safran, who came to Geneva in 1990 to do collaborative research with Scherrer and his medical informatics colleagues. "He\'s a remarkable man who can see over the horizon and has a kind of political talent to get things done."
A man of many interests
His groundbreaking achievements have been recognized for years by other leaders in the field, notes Marion J. Ball, Ed.D., a professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, and a consultant in healthcare. Ball says that the reason Scherrer got the Collen award is that "he has not only been a contributor to the entire field of medical informatics but has also been a mentor and a teacher and has a collection of students and followers within the French-German community in Europe, as well as beyond that, that is second to none."
Scherrer founded the Swiss Society for Medical Informatics in 1984 and was executive president of the European Federation of Medical Informatics from 1996 to 1998. He also held several top leadership positions within the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA), becoming intensively involved in nomenclature and security issues with IMIA working groups over the years.
In addition, Ball says, Scherrer is the model of the modern humanist. He\'s also a wine connoisseur whose family has been involved in winemaking for generations. And Safran recalls that when he did collaborative research with Scherrer, their discussions might as easily veer toward recent books as to the health informatics topic at hand. He describes Scherrer as a true Renaissance man--someone whose scope of interests no doubt contributes to his big-picture understanding and his attitude toward progress.
Still, Scherrer says he was surprised when he learned that he was to receive the Collen prize. "I asked the question, \'Are you sure that you have me in mind, because I have to tell you that I\'m not an American!\'" The ACMI people assured him that he was clearly the one who would be receiving the award, he recalls. They cited his development of the DIOGENE initiative as well as the groundwork leading to the HON Foundation as reasons.
Understanding the Internet\'s capabilities
There is a lot of room left for pioneering work in use of the Internet to support clinical research and collaboration, Scherrer says, because most users still don\'t understand its capabilities too well. The main idea of the Web, he says, was to create hyperlinks not only among sites but also among databases. And those database links, he believes, will be vital to the future progress of research into all the major diseases facing contemporary society.
He\'s optimistic about the future of the Internet and its power to facilitate change and progress, partly because he\'s optimistic by nature, Scherrer says. "It\'s true that the power of economy, money and commerce is so strong that there is a risk that most of the Web will be swallowed by economy. But there are quite a few others working in similar fields like those I mentioned, and I assume that there will still be major Web-facilitated scientific advances going forward."
Mark Hagland is a contributing writer based in Chicago.