Dr Andy Lum helps launch medicine into cyberspace.

• Author: Bronikowski, Lynn
• Position: Kaiser-Permanente Clinic's Central Information System - Column

Dr. Andy Lum plays the computer keyboard in an examining room at the Kaiser-Permanente Clinic in Westminster like a concert pianist, fast and exact. He's demonstrating his formidable typing skills as well as Kaiser's year-old Central Information System, the digital repository of patient information he says is revolutionizing medicine.

Lum is light years ahead of his days at the University of Chicago, when he worked his way through undergraduate school as a Kelly Girl temp, typing up to 100 words per minute.

Yes, they were still "girls" in 1977, he laughs.

Just last April, Lum, Kaiser doctor and information system co-coordinator, faced the daunting task of teaching 500 physicians in Kaiser-Permanente's Denver region to use the CIS system, the largest such medical repository in Colorado and third biggest nationwide.

"Who better to coach doctors than another doctor?" said the 39-year-old internist. "I've always enjoyed tinkering with things, and if I were a few years younger, I might have been drawn to go into computers rather than medicine. But I also love the human contact that medicine offers."

At Kaiser, Lum has managed to combine his passions for medicine and machines. The upshot is a system that reforms rather than replaces traditional medical practice.

"In the old days, you'd have this stack of files on your desk, then you'd hold the file close to your chest when you entered the examining room to see a patient,"...