Saturday, January 21, 2012

Looking Back

Outcomes research was hitting a peak in the medical world in tandem with the career of my boss, David Lansky.  He was director of CUE when I got together with Dawn.  He got me working on FORTRAN on this HP mini-computer, and before long I was in the operating theaters at night, debugging my point of care Visual FoxPro suite, named CORIS (the cath lab counterpart was named CLAIR).

Perfursionists stayed alert and interested, filling in my grids, a professional way to fill the time by feeding researchers useful numbers.  Nurses entered some data.  Paper forms went around later, for doctors to fill out.  A picture of the surgery was developed in the data, as research numbers.

The reputation of the hospital, for doing outcomes research, was kept at a high level.  Interesting work.  Mostly heart related.