Homer R. Warner
Homer R. Warner was a cardiologist and pioneer in medical informatics, the diagnosis and recording of patient symptoms utilizing a main frame computer. He wrote the first version of the software program for the HELP system (Health Evaluation thru Logical Processing). “The use of electronic medical records (EMRs) today is merely the tip of the iceberg perched upon years of Warner's cerebral sweat and passion-driven analysis.”[1]
He was the first chair of the Department of Medical Informatics at the University of Utah School of Medicine. He was president of the American College of Medical Informatics. The University of Utah School of Medicine is the first American medical program to formally offer a degree in medical informatics.
The Homer R. Warner award is presented each year at the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA). It is awarded for the paper that “best describes approaches to improving computerized information acquisition, knowledge data acquisition and management, and experimental results documenting the value of these approaches.”[2]
Warner is the author of Computer-Assisted Medical Decision-Making. He founded the journal "Computers and Biomedical Research" in 1968 and remained its editor for the next 24 years.
He was also a senior member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.
He was involved with the National Institutes of Health. Warner served as director of the cardiovascular laboratory at LDS Hospital from 1954 to 1970 and was honored as Physician of the Year in 1985.
In 1988, he was elected to senior membership in the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.
The Intermountain Healthcare Homer Warner Center for Informatics Research honors one of the industry's recognized fathers of clinical computer systems.
Warner was born on April 18, 1922, in Salt Lake City. He holds an MD degree from the University of Utah, where he also earned his BS degree. He also holds a PhD in physiology from the University of Minnesota. He worked at Parkland Hospital in Dallas, Texas, and the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
He died on November 30, 2012. He and his first wife, Kay, were the parents of six children. Together they served as medical missionaries for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Western European Area from 1996 to 1997. After her passing in 2006, he married Jeanne Okland in 2009. After her passing, he married June Okland Cockrell.
