Building Bridges
William “Bill” Stead, AB’70, MD’74, HS’73-’77, is considered a founder of the field of biomedical informatics. He remembers that it was in 1969 or 1970, while he was still an undergraduate, that he began to make a few slides of what an electronic medical record might look like. “We had no idea at that point how to even represent clinical data in the computer,” he says.
He attributes much of his success to the freedom that Duke gave him early on to try untested ideas.
“What Duke let me do as a student, and then on the faculty, was to try to do things that hadn’t been done or might not work. Duke gave me and others that running room,” he says.
Stead and his wife, Janet, endowed The Eugene Anson Stead Jr., MD, and E. Harvey Estes Jr. ,MD, Associate/Assistant Professorship Fund to honor William Edward “Ed” Hammond, PhD, Professor in Family Medicine and Community Health and Director of the Duke Center for Health Informatics at Duke University.
In the 1970s, first as a medical student and then while a nephrology fellow and member of the faculty at Duke, Stead worked with Hammond and others to build The Medical Record, one of the first practical electronic medical record systems.
Hammond worked across two schools—the Department of Biomedical Engineering in what is now Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering, and the Department of Community Health Sciences in the School of Medicine, under the leadership of E. Harvey Estes Jr., MD.
Eugene A. Stead, Jr., MD, then Chair of the Department of Medicine, set up this arrangement because he recognized the value of interdisciplinary collaboration, and he met regularly with Hammond.
Bill and Janet Stead hope that each holder of this professorship will emulate Hammond’s example of building bridges between disciplines, and will receive senior mentorship from someone like Eugene Stead Jr., MD. “The real motivation for the gift was to honor Ed in a way that in essence creates a pipeline of young Eds,” Bill Stead says.
Upon the retirement or departure of Hammond from Duke University, the professorship will be renamed for him.
Meet the Eugene Anston Stead Jr, MD and E. Harvey Estes Jr, MD Associate Professor