Jerome H. Grossman, Health Care Policy Expert, Is Dead at 68
21 04 08 - 15:24
Dr. Jerome H. Grossman, a health care analyst at Harvard and leading hospital administrator who was influential in applying engineering solutions to make medical care more efficient, died on April 1 at his home in Boston. He was 68.
The cause was renal cell carcinoma, his family said.
Trained as an internist, Dr. Grossman saw a need early in his career for more accurate, complete and portable medical histories. In the late 1960s, relying on the emerging technology of computers, he and others at Massachusetts General Hospital advocated an "automated" records system that could be easily tapped by everyone involved in a patient's treatment.
The result, with Dr. Grossman's input, was an electronic records system that appeared in the 1970s and was used successfully by the Harvard Community Health Plan.
In 1979, Dr. Grossman was named president of the New England Medical Center, now the Tufts Medical Center in Boston. He was frequently involved in panel discussions on new ideas for extending insurance coverage and improving hospital safety and patient care.
Dr. Denis A. Cortese, president and chief executive of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., said Dr. Grossman rapidly became nationally known as an advocate for market-driven solutions and was "heavily and persuasively engaged" in recommending the establishment of a federal health board to oversee health care nationwide, a medical counterpart of the Federal Aviation Administration. The idea was to have issues of safety and even insurance reported directly to regulators, Dr. Cortese explained, without other agencies intervening.
At his death, Dr. Grossman was working on a book about health care policy, "The Innovator's Prescription: A Disruptive Solution to Our Health Care Crisis," expected to be published this year by McGraw-Hill. A co-author, Clayton M. Christensen, a professor of business administration at Harvard, said Dr. Grossman had concluded that outpatient clinics, more sophisticated technology in doctors' offices and larger roles for nurses and physicians' assistants were crucial to lowering costs and raising the quality of care.
Dr. Christensen also noted that Dr. Grossman's experience as a practitioner, administrator and employer put him in an unusual position to cross the "boundaries of business, policy and academia."
Jerome Harvey Grossman was born in Newark, N.J. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before earning a medical degree in 1965 from the University of Pennsylvania.
From 1984 to 1995, he was chairman and chief executive of the New England Medical Center and a professor of medicine at Tufts. In 1997, Dr. Grossman was named a fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard; he later became a senior fellow and directed the Health Care Delivery Program.
He was chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston from 1994 to 1997.
Dr. Grossman is survived by his wife of 40 years, the former Barbara Lieb. The couple lived in Boston and Sandwich, N.H. He is also survived by three daughters, Amelia and Elizabeth, both of Washington, and Kate Sutliff of Newton, Mass.; and a brother, Dr. Sy Grossman, a gastroenterologist, of Berkeley, Calif.