December 14, 2017
Historic Kaiser Permanente artifact donated to Smithsonian Institution
Kaiser Permanente's multiphasic testing artifact represents a centerpiece in American medicine and health care history.
Historians from each of the Permanente Medical Groups arrive at the National Museum of American History.
The clinking of glasses and din of conversation halted when the white-gloved archivists entered the room at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.
Securely bedded on their cart was that evening’s crown jewel, a small, open-faced wooden box. Stuffed with the distinctive punch cards used in mainframe computers, this artifact represented the essence of Permanente Medicine – the sweat of laborers getting their first health examination, the fusion of physician practices with modern electronic systems, and the efficiencies of a medical plan that proudly served a nation in crisis during World War II.
This box and questionnaire cards were key elements of the Kaiser Permanente Automated Multiphasic Examinations.
Diane Wendt, Deputy Chair and Associate Curator of the Division of Medicine and Science, described the donation as “A humble but important object” in the history of American medicine when it was officially turned over at a Permanente Executive Leadership Summit event on Oct. 9, 2017.
The questionnaire cards represented an evolution of a battery of tests originally developed to handle the large influx of longshore workers that came into the health plan in the 1950s. In 1961, the U.S. Public Health Service awarded the Kaiser Foundation Research Institute a grant to study the automation of the multiphasic health testing it had already been conducting manually for 10 years. Members would now go through the screening stations with computer cards that got marked along the way. At the end of the session, which took a couple of hours, there would now be a computerized medical record of their current health status.
Pauline Fox, Esq. (Executive Vice President and Chief Legal Officer, The Permanente Federation, LLC; Interim General Counsel, Colorado Permanente) and Kaiser Permanente historian Lincoln Cushing hamming it up with founding physician Dr. Sidney Garfield.
Those records helped create fundamental medical information. A major medical news story splashed across the world in 2016: “Historic Kaiser Permanente Data to Aid in Long-Term Study to Determine Extent of Ethnic Disparities in Brain Health and Dementia; new $13 million study funded by National Institute on Aging will revisit patients who were first screened as long as 50 years ago.” Yes, that deep data was compiled as part of the Automated Multiphasic examinations, showing the persistent value of that program.
Representing The Permanente Federation at the formal signing of the deed of gift were Geoffrey S. Sewell, MD, FACP (President and Executive Medical Director, Hawaii Permanente Medical Group, Inc.; Chairman, National Permanente Executive Committee, The Permanente Federation, LLC), Richard S. Isaacs, MD (Executive Director and CEO, The Permanente Medical Group; President and CEO, Mid-Atlantic Permanente Medical Group; Co-CEO, The Permanente Federation, LLC), and Edward M. Ellison, MD (Executive Medical Director/Chairman of the Board, Southern California Permanente Medical Group; Chairman of the Board and CEO, The Southeast Permanente Medical Group; Co-CEO, The Permanente Federation, LLC).
