It is an 18-mile commute from his cramped (he calls it "efficient") unit at Sunrise Assisted Living of Walnut Creek. He spends a lot of the drive in the fast lane, zipping along at just over the speed limit.
"I do not ask for pay from KP because I want to be free to do whatever I want to do," he said in a recent e-mail -- his favorite mode of communication. "I do what I do because I love it, and because it helps to keep the marbles rolling in my head!"
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Tuesday, January 06, 2009 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 45 words Type of Material: Correction
Dr. Morris Collen: An article in Saturday's Section A about 95-year-old doctor Morris Collen said that when he earned his medical degree in 1939, penicillin had yet to be discovered. Penicillin was discovered in 1928, but no one was successfully treated with it until 1942.
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Seven men and one woman sit around a table in a windowless gray meeting room in downtown Oakland on a Wednesday morning in November. On the wall is a giant banner celebrating the "Morris F. Collen, M.D. Research Library and Conference Center."
"Dr. Morris Collen continues to work at the Division of Research with Principal Investigator Joe Terdiman in development of the National Research Data Base," the banner says. "The project is testing and evaluating data mining methods for detecting and monitoring adverse events that occur in patient healthcare."
When the database is complete, it could house data on nearly 29 million Kaiser Permanente patients past and present, including some electronic records going back 40 years. There will be federal mortality data and census information.
Terdiman, whom Collen hired in the 1960s and has worked with ever since, calls it a kind of "one-stop shopping" for researchers.
Collen developed Kaiser's very first database in the 1960s, a repository of electronic medical records that also was mined for research purposes. It was a time when information was collected on punch cards and computers took up entire rooms.
He was the catalyst for this latest project, which Kaiser is working on with IBM, and designed several studies to be carried out beginning in 2009 with the newly compiled data.
One in particular is near and dear to his statin-assisted heart: figuring out how elderly patients are affected by the interaction of multiple drugs.
"Every decade you add another pill," says Collen, who takes eight medications every day. "So by the ninth decade, you're taking about nine pills. And I used to think, gee, if I took all those nine pills and threw them into a hot cup of coffee, what would happen?
"And here I throw them into my stomach, with hydrochloric acid," he continues. "Parke-Davis and each of them studies their own drugs. They don't study the others."
