Does Ed Hammond, PhD, process oxygen twice as fast as the average man? It’s as good as any other explanation for how the esteemed biomedical informatician climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro at age 79 and how he keeps his energy and curiosity as strong today as they were 58 years ago, when he created one of the first computer-based medical histories for patients in the country, in what was then the newly created Department of Community Health Sciences (now the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health) at Duke.
What followed could be a history of the field and the discipline. Hammond continued following his interests, founding and leading professional associations, teaching, publishing, collaborating, and always learning. Duke will host a symposium to honor Hammond, “From Foundations to Future of Informatics in Health,” on Jan. 9 and 10, 2025. Hammond accepts the honor but said the event is much more than a celebration of his 90th birthday. “I wouldn’t pay to go to Ed Hammond’s birthday party,” he said. “We have some of the top people in the field coming, some of whom have retired. They’re the giants whose shoulders we’re standing on, and there will be a chance to meet them.”
How Hammond ended up as an undergraduate at Duke, much less anything that came after, is a whale of a tale. Hammond’s grandfather was a cotton mill superintendent in Henderson County, North Carolina. Hammond’s father and six uncles all worked there. Hammond’s father died when Hammond, the youngest of five siblings, was 4 years old. Hammond’s mother re-married, and the family moved to the tiny community of Mountain Valley, to a house with no electricity, no running water, and no outhouse. “Ultimately, my mother demanded an outhouse,” Hammond said. “We had two holes, plus a snake.”
Most children quit school as early as possible, but Hammond showed academic promise. While in second grade, he taught first-graders to read. “The normal behavior was, you got to 16 years old, and you could drop out of school. You worked at a cotton mill during the wintertime. In the summertime, you quit, and you did farming, and in wintertime, you went back to work at the cotton mill again. That was an overall pattern, and almost everybody did it, but I had other ideas,” he said. Eventually he moved in with an aunt in Hendersonville so he could go to high school there, and then came to Duke on a Navy ROTC scholarship.
This pattern — some combination of determination, drive and serendipity — continue through the subsequent seven decades (so far) of Hammond’s life. He got into Delta Sigma Phi fraternity while not being able to afford it. Duke didn’t have a graduate school when Hammond was an undergraduate, but by the time he had served three years in the Navy, it had started a graduate program in electrical engineering. Charles Vail, PhD, chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering, submitted Hammond’s application while he was at sea. Also somehow, he completed two years of medical school while also completing a postdoctoral fellowship. “I knew I wasn't interested in being an MD, but I was interested in knowing how doctors worked,” he said.
(Hammond’s Scholars at Duke profile lists only a handful of his “main” interests: computer-based medical records, hospital information systems, national and international standards, artificial intelligence, networking, and computerization in ambulatory care. But Hammond, considered a founder of modern biomedical informatics, said he is interested in everything. Thus, skydiving above Pinehurst, scuba diving off Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, hang gliding above Ipanema, Brazil. He climbed Machu Picchu last June. Oh, and he’s a ballroom dancer who competes all over the world.)
While in medical school, Hammond had gotten himself involved in so many interests that he barely had time to attend classes. “During that period of time, two things happened, one of which is Duke started a biomedical engineering program. That fit what I really wanted to do, to put those together, so then I became one of the founding faculty for that program and became faculty while still doing a postdoc,” he said. The other thing that happened was someone wrote a grant for multiple health screening, he said, that would provide automated testing to aid a patient’s physical exam. The applicant listed Hammond on the grant as an assistant professor. “The grant didn't get funded, but I became an assistant professor,” he said. “I think I'm the only faculty member — I’d be willing to bet — that became a faculty member but never got interviewed by anybody.”
“Ed does not want us to linger on the past. He is always looking for what’s next.” —David Page, PhD, Chair of the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics
More serendipitous events, including his salary being paid for by Eugene A. Stead, Jr., MD, then-chair of the Department of Medicine, plus a construction company donating a minicomputer called the PDP-12 to the Department of Biomedical Engineering, plus Hammond’s own intellect, led to the first electronic medical record. “No one in Biomedical Engineering was interested in using the minicomputer,” Hammond said, “So they let me have it.” By then he was on the faculty. “I decided I was going to do an electronic medical record,” he said. “I was fortunate to get a team of outstanding students with complementary skills.” That led to the team creating a new programming language (GEMISCH) and an electronic health record that he named The Medical Record (TMR), aiming for simplicity. Hammond still owns the copyright.
David Page, PhD, James B. Duke Professor of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, and Chair of the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, said the symposium is an ideal way to honor Hammond. “Ed does not want us to linger on the past. He is always looking for what’s next,” Page said. “So while the programming will cover our field’s history, we will use those lessons to look ahead. Ed will be there, learning and looking ahead as much as any of us.”