C. William Hanson III

C. William Hanson, III, MD, is a Professor of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine with joint appointments in the Departments of Surgery and Internal Medicine. He also has an appointment as Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science. He was appointed Chief Medical Information Officer and Vice President, UPHS in May 2010. Before that, he was Division Chief for Critical Care in the Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care. An internist and anesthesiologist, he was also Medical Director of the Surgical Intensive Care Unit. Dr. Hanson also has extensive experience in medical informatics and previously was a Visiting Professor in the Princeton University Department of Computer Science, where he taught between 2002 and 2005. Dr. Hanson served as the Chair of the HUP Medical Board from 2004 to 2006 and was instrumental in the development of Penn Elert, teleICU program, serving as its founding Medical Director. He is the author of numerous peer reviewed articles on critical care issues and computers in medicine and several books including Healthcare Informatics and The Edge of Medicine. 

Dr. Hanson graduated Alpha Omega Alpha from the School of Medicine in 1983. He completed his internal medicine residency at Stanford and a residency in anesthesia as well as a critical care fellowship at Penn. Bill's history at Penn Medicine is especially strong, as a second-generation Penn Medicine faculty member and having been taught by Penn notables such as Drs. Sylvan Eisman, Francis Wood, and Jonathan Rhoads during his training. 

The Hanson family has been involved with the College since the early 1970s. C. William (Bill) Hanson, III, MD, has been a Fellow of the College since 2000. His late father, C. William Hanson, Jr., was also a Fellow of the College, elected in 1972.  And his mother, Ann Hanson, was a long-time dedicated member of the former Women’s Committee. A plaque in the College’s Medicinal Plant Garden recognizes his father and longtime friend and College Fellow, Howard H. Steele, MD (F’1955).     

Did your father inspire/encourage you to enter medicine?

My father never actually encouraged me to go into medicine (although he expressed skepticism about the value of a BA in English).   

What was your father’s advice to you as you embarked on your medical career?

He told me that the “medicine” I had observed growing up – through the admittedly limited perspective of a child of a doctor – was not the same medicine that would be there when I arrived as a doctor. That has turned out to be remarkably prescient advice, as I’ve observed the pace of change in the profession increasing, if anything, year over year since I entered the field. 

What advice would you give young adults wanting to enter the medical field today?

For the right person, with the right motivations, medicine is like a candy shop, or perhaps a hardware store, or a bookstore, a field with endless possible paths and rewards. For someone who believes, or perhaps was guided to believe, that becoming a doctor is a path to an economically secure, stable career, protected from societal turbulence, that person should think twice. Medicine is likely to change rapidly, and in unexpected or unpredictable ways, over the course of the next decade, which will be exhilarating for some, and not so much for others. 

Orville Horwitz, MD, wrote a memoir of your father in 1992 for Transaction and Studies, a former College publication. He wrote, “Bill's most memorable characteristic was his consistently superb set of values. To him, the care of the patient was always the most important consideration in medicine. Bill was always very conscious of this point." Dr. Hanson, can you comment on the importance of direct patient care in today’s practice of medicine?  

My father was a doctor’s doctor – he took care of university faculty, fellow physicians, and friends with a keen sense of people, their needs, fears and hopes. When he died unexpectedly and at a relatively young age, I heard that repeated over and over again in letters and personally – how he listened and engaged with his patients. My professional areas – anesthesiology, critical care and healthcare informatics – are all quite technical and arguably less reliant on humanistic qualities, but I think to do any of them well, it is critical to do so with the human front and center. It’s a scared human rolling into the operating room for a surgical procedure; a stressed and frightened family whose loved one is on a ventilator and dialysis in the intensive care unit; an overworked and burned out doctor wrestling with the electronic medical record. My job (our job) in each of those settings is to understand and to bridge the gap or translate between the technology and the people.  

How has it changed over the years, and is there a need for change and/or improvement?

However much medicine changes and evolves, these priorities are its core. When we drift away from them and let time (rushed) or technology get in the way or interfere, we are no longer doing our job and bad things happen. 

In your biography, it notes that you were “trained by Penn notables such as Drs. Sylvan Eisman, Francis Wood and Jonathan Rhoads." How has medical education and training evolved since your time as a medical student and early days of training? What would you like to see changed, if anything, for today’s medical students?

The rate of change in medicine and the associated pressures to both digest the fundamentals and stay current with new developments has increased substantially since I was in medical school. Today’s students must digest a huge amount of information in a relatively short period of time, make an often insufficiently informed choice of specialties, and then enter a prolonged period of residency before entering the workforce as a ‘grown-up’ doctor. Many more young doctors start a family during medical school or residency – which has dramatically changed their priorities when compared to my medical training. Work hours restrictions and accommodations for parental leave are now widely prevalent or required. Efforts have been made to accelerate residency and fellowship for fields like cardiac surgery. Today’s new medical practitioners have an arguably better work-life balance than their forbears. I do believe that we could do a better job of integrating new technology into the basic medical curriculum – like virtually every other industry, medicine is in the midst of disruption by technologies like the electronic medical record, health information exchange, data mining and AI, and we’re not training our students adequately about the implications for their practice and the future of the field. 

You chair the College’s Program Advisory Group, which is a current version of the former Committee on Program (which your father chaired). Why is this role important to you? How do your goals for this advisory group align with what you see as the College’s role today and vision for the future?  

The College is the oldest medical society in the country and one of its key missions is the continuing education of its Fellows, the local medical community, and the public. We envision an ongoing series of lectures and forums that are equally relevant to doctors and the lay community. These include topics like medicine and the climate, equity in medical education and practice, social media and medicine and technology (including artificial intelligence) with its profound impacts on medicine.  

In addition to Dr. Hanson’s role as Professor of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine, he also has an appointment as Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science and was appointed Chief Medical Information Officer and Vice President for the UPHS in May 2010. 

Dr. Hanson, on October 26th you presented The Bernard Behrend Lecture: Artificial Intelligence in Medicine: Deus or Machina? How did you become involved in medical technology and informatics? Can you give us a brief preview of your thoughts on the influence AI will have on the practice of medicine?  

I first used computers in high school and worked with a faculty member at Penn on a school project. After finishing college and before starting medical school, I spent a year working with the same faculty member who was now running ‘data processing’ at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. I continued to work with data processing through medical school and eventually did a sabbatical year at Princeton in their Computer Science department. This turned into a teaching appointment there for four years. At the same time, we started an intensive care telemedicine program at Penn Medicine, which I directed, and that led to my appointment as the organization’s first chief medical information officer – the role that translates between clinical needs and information technology. As we have digitized medical data, we have become increasingly able to use data mining and artificial intelligence to extract information from that data and produce actionable results. These come in the form of image analysis (radiographs, skin lesions, retinal images, pathology slides etc.) AI can identify occult trends in text files or waveforms. And as we have seen recently, AI can synthesize complicated data – like a medical record – and produce summaries or draft a communication with a patient or colleague. The possibilities are endless, and some believe AI represents an existential threat to the practice of medicine. I am an optimist, however, and believe that we will find ways for AI to act as a medical ‘sorcerer’s apprentice’ – helping patients and providers in a a range of predictable and unpredictable ways.  

Thank you, Dr. Hanson, for sharing your insights with us. Anything else you would like to tell us?  

I would just say that medicine continues to attract the best and the brightest, and that given the talents and energies of these evolving leaders and the new tools we are developing with information technology, genetics and gene-based therapies and intelligent devices, the future of medicine is bright.