1997 Annual Report
Harry Dennis, M.D.
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Harry Dennis doesn't recall the first time he was flooded out of his home on DeSoto Drive in Palo Alto, a cul-de-sac that forms a "kind of natural lake" during rare floods. He was only a year old when he was evacuated during the flooding of 1955.
But he does recall the El Niño flooding of February, 1998, when water invaded the basement of the home (just four blocks away from his early residence) that he shares with his wife, Susan, and their two children, Emily, l2, and Owen, 10.
Now a popular pediatrician at PAMF (where he once was a patient of now-retired pediatrician Joe Davis), Dr. Dennis is known for his affability, his interest in a wide range of medical and health issues, his exploration of how computers are revolutionizing health care delivery--and his bow ties.
"Some of my patients call me Dr. Bow-tie,'" he says with a quick smile, adding that wearing bow ties runs in the family: His father, businessman Reid Dennis, and great-grandfather both sported them. For a pediatrician, there's a practical reason: Babies can't grab them or get them wet during examinations.
But the path that led Dr. Dennis full circle back to Palo Alto and the Pediatrics Department has been roundabout, touching some core issues of his generation.
"I never really talked about becoming a pediatrician until I was in my mid-20s," Dr. Dennis recalls. "In high school and college I really wanted to be a public-interest lawyer; I wanted to be Ralph Nader."
By high school, his family--with brothers Reid and Don and a sister, Suki--had moved to Woodside. By his junior year at Woodside High School, he had attuned to the social and environmental issues of 1970: Earth Day was organized in the Palo Alto/Stanford area, and there was strong concern about social justice. He was one of about 400 white students who spent a year at the former Ravenswood High School in East Palo Alto in a desegregation program: "The academics were not as strong, but the social education I received was invaluable. It showed me how complex things were."
Earth Day had a personal impact: "Before Earth Day I did a lot of yard work, shoveling horse dung, cutting lawns and delivering papers. With that money, I bought a motorcycle that I had for a year. Then Earth Day came in 1970 and, with a pang of guilt, I sold the Hodaka 100 and bought a nice 10-speed." He now has a mountain bike, and rides in the Baylands with his son.
"I did a lot of bicycling and backpacking in high school and college," Dr. Dennis recalls of his time in Woodside and the University of California, Berkeley. He backpacked in the Himalayas after graduating from Berkeley.
Dr. Dennis also has a pilot's license, stemming primarily from his father's longtime interest in aviation.
At UC Berkeley, he majored in rhetoric but also was drawn to science classes. After graduating, he worked for three years editing an environmental magazine and writing a book on California's Peripheral Canal that received excellent reviews. But he found writing too solitary, and "I knew I would never be H.L. Mencken. My prose walked--it didn't glide; it didn't fly."
At 29, he returned to school, to the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine. He selected pediatrics in his third year--"I found I just like pediatricians, and kids"--and rediscovered the virtues of bow ties.
Dr. Dennis says he chose PAMF largely because physicians have a high degree of flexibility in how they practice, which is especially important in pediatrics. "You see some kids who have problems that just take more time to discuss. That's where you get a chance to develop a relationship with your patients that allows you to make a difference, and that's very satisfying."
Dr. Dennis' interest in using computers in his practice dates back to something Dr. Davis advised him when he first joined PAMF in 1990: "He said, `Harry, keep a 3x5 card on each of your patients, and just jot down a few notes about them, so when they call you'll be able to remember what their problems are, what the mom's and dad's names are, who the brother is.'"
When he passed 1,000 cards on top of his desk, Dr. Dennis says he started thinking of a better way. He had a Macintosh computer at home, and he spent the summer of 1992 entering data.
"It's made a huge difference," he says of his homemade database. "It's so rudimentary it's laughable. But when the phone rings and a parent asks me about their child, I can see that the brother has asthma, too, so I ask about the brother. And the process of creating and maintaining it helped me learn my patients' names and circumstances better."
He has been a co-leader (with family practitioner Steven Lane) of a team of physicians and staff members who are working on an electronic medical record, or EMR--an advanced, secure system to store information and aid in diagnoses, treatment and overall communication with patients. PAMF is a pilot project for the entire Sutter Health system in Northern California.
"The Foundation is lucky because, at a time when we are making a huge transition in how we manage medical information, we have a bright, energetic and dedicated group of people, including physicians, who want to help drive this change. We've enjoyed administrative support, but it was really the group of doctors--Mike Trollope (a surgeon and longtime chair of PAMF's Clinical Computing Committee) and people before him--who have gotten us to where we are, to the edge of launching this EMR."
Yet he still values his old computer files: "I'm convinced this database made me like a solo practitioner in a little office. It's not that they know their patients that much better; it's that they always have the patient's (paper) chart at hand. They flip the chart open and there's all that information. My database lets me always `flip the chart open.' It made me realize what a vacuum we work in when we're dealing with paper records that can't be in our hand when a patient calls.
"It made things far more efficient, and made me more comfortable with my patients," he says, thinking back--to the future.