Class Notes

James G. Ravin (M.D. 1968, Residency 1974) recently co-authored with Michael F. Marmor, M.D., The Artist’s Eyes, a book about the health, especially ocular, of well-known artists such as Claude Monet (who had cataracts) and Georgia O’Keeffe (who suffered from macular degeneration). The book also covers artists’ use of visual phenomena. Ravin is an ophthalmologist in private practice in Toledo, Ohio, and a clinical associate professor at the University of Toledo College of Medicine.

John Goldblum (M.D. 1989) recently published two textbooks: Enzinger and Weiss’s Soft Tissue Tumors, fifth edition, and Surgical Pathology of the GI Tract, Liver, Biliary Tract and Pancreas. Goldblum has been a gastrointestinal and soft tissue pathologist at the Cleveland Clinic since 1992, and chair of its Department of Anatomic Pathology since 2001.

Nat Pernick (M.D. 1983) has started The Detroit College Promise, a charity for Detroit Public School students. For 2009-10, the fund will provide college scholarships for 138 eligible students at Cody High School in Detroit. Pernick is president of PathologyOutlines.com, in Bingham Farms, Michigan, a Web site dedicated to providing professional information to pathologists and pathology lab personnel.

Frederick “Rick” Ganzi (M.D. 1990) completed the 56-mile Comrades Marathon in South Africa, the world’s oldest and largest ultra-marathon. Cheering him on was his wife of 19 years, Lois Ganzi (M.D. 1990), who practices with him at Macatawa Anesthesia, PC, in Holland, Michigan. Of the 13,000 runners, Ganzi placed as the first American overall, and was the only American to receive a silver medal.

Michael Halpern (M.D. and Ph.D. 1992), a senior health scientist at RTI International in North Carolina, was named an RTI senior fellow. Selected staff receive the honor in recognition of their commitment to science, technology, research and policy analysis to improve the human condition. Halpern also is an adjunct professor at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University in Atlanta, and at the Public Policy Institute at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

MCAS Honors Alumni

The Medical Center Alumni Society paid tribute to two alumni on September 23 at the annual MCAS Awards Dinner. Norman S. Talner (M.D. 1949, Residency 1952), an emeritus professor of pediatrics at Yale University School of Medicine and Duke University School of Medicine, received the Distinguished Service Award. The Distinguished Achievement Award was given to Louis C. Argenta (M.D. 1969, Residencies 1977 and 1979), who founded the Department of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at Wake Forest University and served as the Distinguished Howell Professor and chair there for 20 years before earning emeritus status.
—MF

Visit www.medicineatmichigan.org/MCAS/awards.asp for nomination forms and more information. Nominations for 2010 awards must be postmarked by January 31, 2010.

The Inevitable Work of Vik Kheterpal

If Vikas “Vik” Kheterpal (M.D. 1991) needed verification that his work at the intersection of information technology and medicine is meaningful, he got it when he and his wife took her father to the emergency room on Thanksgiving last year. Kheterpal’s brother, his wife and her four siblings also are physicians.

“The ER physicians asked several detailed questions, and to most of them we could only say ‘I don’t know,’ ” he recalls. “There were six M.D.s in the family standing there, and our ability to help him was crippled by the lack of access to his medical records.” Kheterpal’s father-in-law is doing well, but getting patients on the same page with their information still has a long way to go.

Kheterpal fell in love with computers after his family immigrated to suburban Detroit from India in 1980, when he was 14. He was already the founder of a successful plant floor automation software company when he entered the U-M’s Inteflex Program — a former seven-year, combined undergraduate and medical school program — three years later.

He continued running the company while in medical school, in addition to automating surgery professor Robert Bartlett’s (M.D. 1963) ICU patient flow sheet, in part because Kheterpal was tired of the tedium of collating information for rounds. After earning his M.D., Kheterpal decided to focus on his business, Systems Engineering Consultants (SEC) Inc., instead of pursuing a residency.

General Electric acquired SEC in 2000 — many of its software products are still in use throughout the U-M Health System — and Kheterpal led the GE clinical IT business until 2003 when he left to start a new company. CareEvolution Inc., based in Dexter, Michigan, provides technology for deploying health information exchanges. The company focuses on connecting hospitals and physician practices, so they have access to one another’s automated medical records.

“Dr. Bartlett thought it was a little crazy to walk away from being an M.D. at Michigan,” he says, “but I thought, it’s happening now, the technology is here, and I couldn’t not pursue it. And I couldn’t have been more wrong. It’s been 18 years, and now the next decade is considered the decade of health care IT. Health care is slow to change — things take longer than you think.”

That never shook Kheterpal’s conviction that information technology can make health care more efficient financially and more effective clinically. “The fundamental problem is that information doesn’t keep up with the pace with which the patient moves through our fragmented system,” he says. “So when a patient shows up at the ER, we waste time getting information, and we incur risk that we do the wrong thing. Our innovation was that there ought to be a patient-centric information model.”

There’s plenty of resistance to implementing his vision. Some doctors say keeping track of information already available to them is sufficiently challenging, and a reimbursement system that Kheterpal calls “perverse” doesn’t encourage sharing data with institutions viewed as competitors.

“I heard a speaker at a conference a few years ago say, ‘Inevitable things eventually do happen.’ This is inevitable. It is going to happen.”
—JEFF MORTIMER