Founder of the HELP System and the Utah Informatics Program: Interview with Homer R. Warner


Homer R. Warner, MD, PhD, was a cardiologist who pioneered many aspects of using computers to augment the practice of medicine, including clinical decision support tools.
INTERVIEWED BY DEAN SITTIG MAY 16, 2005 in SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH

Homer R. Warner was born in 1920 at the Latter Day Saints (LDS) Hospital in Salt Lake City and went on to create that hospital’s first cardiovascular diagnostic laboratory in 1954. He created the University of Utah’s Department of Biophysics and Bioengineering in 1964, and in 1972, the Medical Biophysics and Computing Department split off
from Biophysics and Bioengineering. In 1985, it became the Medical Informatics Department, and, thus, the first such department in the United States. Dr. Warner founded and became the first Chair of that department, now known as the Department of Biomedical Informatics in the School of Medicine, in 1972. Dr. Warner and his colleagues developed the HELP (Health Evaluation through Logical Processing) system, which is still in use today at Intermountain Healthcare.

Click to read the complete interview.

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