Clement McDonald

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Clem grew up in the Chicago suburbs learning independence and cooperation (age 5) pooling money with his friends to ride the El downtown only to learn that one child spent the return fare on a candy bar. Together, they problem solved their way home.

A son of an electrical engineer father, Clem Sr., and an accomplished pianist mother, Margaret, he found his calling in medicine and a strong interest in medical informatics his senior year of medical school. But he wouldn’t let new job as a first-year resident at Boston City Hospital (BCH) get in the way of leading in the field of medical informatics.

After a year of residency at BCH, he returned to the Midwest to study biomedical engineering at Northwestern University, followed by a fellowship at NIH where in developed the first clinical laboratory system, writing it in assembly language on the mainframe computer. He completed his residency at Cook County Hospital and the University of Wisconsin. He believed computers could transform patient care long before most other imagined it possible. He was recruited to the Regenstrief Institute and Marion County Hospital (later renamed Wishard Hospital and then Eskenazi) in Indianapolis to begin his dream.

His colleagues knew him as master diagnostician internist, unparallelled, as well as “the computer guy.” He was among the first to promote the use of computers for healthcare record-keeping to reduce errors and improve outcomes. In the 1970s, he built the first functional comprehensive electronic medical record systems at Regenstrief Institute. He later established Indiana Network Patient Care, a groundbreaking statewide health information exchange that allows computers across different hospitals and health systems to communicate with one another other to reduce errors and improve patient outcomes while strengthening collaboration across healthcare systems. Most notably, he humbly and intentionally developed LOINC, a public-domain standard that encodes, laboratory, pharmacy and clinical data. By making it freely available worldwide, to encode laboratory and clinical results, he helped improve patient care for millions.

He concluded his distinguished career by serving as the Director of the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communication (LHNCBC) and the Scientific Director of its intramural research program at the National Institutes of Health.

Tenacious in work, as in play, he courted the love of his life, Barbara, with determination and humor, by crashing her other dates to woo her away. After marrying and settling in Indianapolis, they raised their family surrounded by fields to plant his trees, woods, a creek, and neighboring farms with horses and bulls — a childhood environment chosen to teach their children independence and curiosity. Though he devoted countless hours to building the future of electronic medical records, he always made time for Barbara and their three children. Summer evenings brought family bike rides after dinner, trips to the institute to print old-fashioned copies of the children’s handprints to give Barbara a break, and muddy adventures through Turkey Run State Park and National Parks fueled by donuts, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and the ever-requisite chocolate milk.

Friends and family blessed him with many warm farewells in his final weeks. He loved greatly, forgave easily, and held onto life until the end.

Clem is survived by his wife Barbara; children Carolyn, Clem (Kellie), and Christopher (Julie); and five grandchildren. Services will be held at St. Alphonsus Catholic Church in Zionsville, Indiana on Friday, June 5th, with a public viewing at 10 a.m. and funeral at 10:50 a.m.

In lieu of flowers, the family kindly requests donations to a charity of your choice in his memory. Clem believed deeply in free choice, generosity, and supporting causes that held personal meaning to each person.