IN MEMORIAM

Henrik Blum

Professor of Health Planning and Policy, Emeritus

Berkeley

1915 – 2006

Henrik L. Blum, professor emeritus of health administration and planning and a pioneer in health care reform, died from cardiac arrhythmia on January 3, 2006 at his home in Oakland four days after a fall. He was 90.

 

Henrik’s early life was spent on a farm in the Napa Valley of California. Many of his views on social justice were formed growing up in that area during the economic depression of the 1930s. In that farming community, he learned about the importance of honesty and integrity and about using direct, bold approaches to solve problems. He also discovered the need to evaluate the character and competence of colleagues and not yield to ethnic prejudices that still prevail in many communities 80 years later.

 

At the age of 11, Henrik entered Napa High School. Most of his classmates were much older and bigger and stronger and Henrik protected himself from the rough and tumble of those days by emphasizing intellectual activities. He was admitted to the University of California (at the age of 16) at about the time that the family farm went bankrupt. He graduated from Berkeley with honors in chemistry and, earning most of his own money, entered medical school at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). During his medical training, Henrik was a class leader, ranking number one in his class academically. His internship in a public health service hospital in 1941-42 and subsequent service during World War II introduced him to the field of public health.

 

Nevertheless, after the war, Henrik held residencies in medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and at Stanford University Medical Center. Instead of practicing medicine, however, he resumed and intensified an interest in public health by entering the School of Public Health at Harvard University. He received the master of public health degree there in 1948 and, returning to California in 1950, he became the health officer for Contra Costa County. In this position, he really came into his own. He established many innovative programs, including those in community mental health, genetic counseling and a highly innovative and famous program in vision screening.

 

During this time, Henrik was also a lecturer in the School of Public Health at Berkeley and, in 1966, he joined the faculty as a clinical professor. Two years later, he was appointed Professor of Community Health Planning. In 1970, Blum established the school's Program in Planning and Policy, chairing it until his retirement in 1984. Continuing his innovations, he also established a pioneering American Indian Graduate Program which awarded graduate degrees in public health to American Indians and Alaska Natives. In 1991, he was called back from retirement to serve as interim chair of the unique and ground breaking Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program, a position he held for three years. In this capacity he reinvigorated the program, so that it is now a national model for medical education.

 

Considered the father of health planning, Blum saw the need to reorganize a health care system that was disjointed, inefficient, and, above all, inequitable. When the legislation authorizing Medicare and Medicaid was enacted in the mid-1960s, at a time when the provision of medical services for the poor and elderly was virtually nonexistent, Blum recognized another opportunity for innovation. The massive infusion of federal funding made everyone aware of critical shortages of physicians, nurses, dentists, and other health professionals, as well as of facilities in which to provide service. Given this situation, Henrik envisioned a comprehensive U.S. health system that actively involved consumer and provider participation in decision-making about the types of health care services to be made available locally, regionally, and nationally. This was a major conceptual breakthrough in rational planning for health care and health service resources. While this idea may seem obvious now, it was a truly radical idea in the 1960s and 1970s.

 

 In 1978, Henrik envisaged a new type of health maintenance organization (HMO) for California. At that time, the only HMO in California was the Kaiser Permanente Health Plan. This plan required physicians to be employed by Kaiser and it of course limited the physicians that people could choose. Henrik organized a new plan called HEALS that allowed community physicians to join a new type of health maintenance organization, one that gave patients access to a broad selection of providers. He served as chairman of the board for HEALS from 1984 to 1987. HEALS later evolved into HealthNet, one of the largest HMOs in the nation.

 

“He was one of the most creative thinkers in public health,” said Dr. Philip Lee, former chancellor of UCSF and advisor to Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton. Lee said that Professor Blum was a rare leader in the academic world who also worked closely with the community served by public institutions. As such, he was “a role model and a fantastic mentor for students.”

 

Henrik was consultant to or member of numerous committees for the National Institutes of Health, American Public Health Association, U.S. Public Health Service, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, U.S. Agency for International Development, and the World Health Organization. Blum also served as president of the California Conference of Local Health Officers and the Northern California Public Health Association, and as chairman of the Board of Trustees of Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley. In addition to his numerous research publications, he authored three landmark texts on community health and health planning: Public Health Administration: A Public Health Viewpoint; Health Planning; and Planning for Health. These texts are considered to be the most important early works on community health ever produced.

 

Among his many awards were the 1985 Sedgwick Memorial Medal, the most prestigious honor of the American Public Health Association; the 1985 Schlesinger Award of the American Health Planning Association; and the 1984 Berkeley Citation, one of the highest honors on campus. The American Health Planning Association, which describes Professor Blum as a “champion of healthcare equity,” sponsors an annual award named in his honor. He also received a Fulbright Scholarship to Sweden in 1986 and, in 1987, he spent a year as a visiting professor at West China University of Medical Services in Chendu, China.

 

Henrik was predeceased by his wife, the former Marian H. Ehrich, who died on October 21, 2005; they met while they were both undergraduates at Cal and were married on Christmas Eve in 1939. They were married for 55 years. He is survived by his nieces, Lynda Brothers of San Mateo, and Peggy Brothers Cory of Placerville, California.

 

 

S. Leonard Syme

Joyce C. Lashof

Warren Winkelstein Jr.