Loss of an Early Informatics Visionary

I am saddened to learn of the passing of Dr. Burton "Bud" Rose due to complications of Covid-19. Dr. Rose was the creator of the well-known UpToDate online medical information system, which is used by clinicians around the world. I played a tiny role in the development of UpToDate by programming its first search capability. In the late 1980s, I was a postdoctoral fellow in medical informatics at Brigham & Women's Hospital, working in the lab of my mentor, Dr. Robert Greenes. Dr. Rose, a kidney specialist, came to Dr. Greenes seeking help to add a searching capability to a collection of "cards" of information about kidney diseases he had collated in an Apple Hypercard Stack. My research had been focusing, then as now, on information retrieval (search) systems. It was relatively straightforward to connect a simple system I had programmed to index and retrieve from the information in the cards. It was a marvel at the time to be able to type in a few words and get medical information, years before the onset of the World Wide Web and Google.

I ultimately finished my fellowship and moved on to Oregon in 1990, and the development of UpToDate was taken over by a fellowship colleague, Dr. Joseph Rush, who stayed on the project for years as it matured into a commercial product that expanded to all of medicine. In 2008, UpToDate was acquired by the large publisher, Kluwer. I had not seen Dr. Rose in many years, but he continued to be a vibrant clinician and educator until his recent retirement.

UpToDate is still widely used and revered in medical settings around the world. I believe its real value is in its content. While its modern search functionality is excellent, what really draws clinicians to it is the quality of its content that can be used to make clinical decisions based on rapid access to high-quality information.