On April 24, 2020, Medicine lost one of its great innovators and educators. Burton Rose passed away at the age of 77, a victim of SARS-CoV-21. A graduate of Princeton University, he went to Medical school at New York University and served on the faculty at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Harvard.2 In 1992, Dr. Rose created UpToDate®, a computer-based online medical resource now including 25 specialties, and used by more than 1.9 million physicians from 197 countries.
I first met Dr. Rose in the early 1990s, shortly after he decided to expand his novel UpToDate® computer-based educational programs to include topics on Pulmonary Medicine. At first, the program was available on 3.5-inch floppy disks. If I recall, back in 1995, having a PC with a 1-gigabyte hard drive was cause for celebration, and a Mac LC-500 was an educator’s dream, with its all-in-one desktop design, 14-inch CRT display, and built-in CD-ROM.
Dr. Rose’s colleague in Boston, Professor Steven Weinberger (former Executive Vice-President and CEO of the American College of Physicians), served as Editor-In-Chief of UpToDate®’s new Pulmonology and Critical Care Medicine (a position currently held by Peter Barnes, Talmadge King, and Polly Parsons). I had the honor of authoring several chapters and serving as an editor with my friend, Praveen Mathur, who sadly passed away a few years ago. We were delighted when the leadership team approved our request to start an Interventional Pulmonology Section, and it is with pleasure and pride that I continue to serve UpToDate® as an author and section editor, sharing the IP editorial role now with Professor David Feller-Kopman.
Burton Rose was amazing. In addition to being a brilliant physician, medical writer, and dedicated teacher, he had the entrepreneurial instinct to recognize that physicians thrive on evidence-based medicine. By creating UpToDate®, he designed an easy-to-access program that allowed health care professionals to query the text with questions as well as by disease. Beginning with a proof-of-concept using his own specialty, Nephrology, he moved on to Primary care Medicine and all subspecialties. UpToDate® quickly became a leading resource for point-of-care medical practitioners and students everywhere.
According to a short video on the UpToDate® website, the program is accessed more than 1 million times and contributes to 300,000 medical decisions each day. This makes it an essential element of health care practice3. Subscriptions are available to individuals as well as institutions, and UpToDate® generously provided affordable subscriptions to trainees and hospitals in countries with low financial resources.
The greatest key to the program’s success, of course, is the accuracy and timeliness of its content. Material is constantly reviewed and updated by a team of professional editors, deputy-editors, writers, contributors, and peer-reviewers4. Quality is of the utmost importance. This has not changed since UpToDate® was bought by the global provider of professional information and software solutions, Wolters Kluwer in 2008.
Doctor Burton Rose was a true believer in the democratization of knowledge. He did all he could to provide information to medical practitioners around the world, and he assembled a team of dedicated individuals who made his mission their own. He will not be forgotten.
References
- https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/BostonGlobe/obituary.aspx?page=lifestory&pid=196075793
- https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/25/remembering-uptodate-creator-burton-bud-rose/
- https://www.uptodate.com/home/uptodate-story
- https://www.uptodate.com/home
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