Daniel Navarro, MD

Dr. Daniel Navarro’s wife wanted a new refrigerator, while he wanted a personal computer. It was one or the other and fortunately, he got his word processor. It was the mid 1980s and few people had even heard of personal computers.

Dr. Navarro took his new computer to work, taught himself how to use it and ended up revolutionizing the way his colleagues view and share medical images. His efforts helped transform medical imagery from film-based to digital, enabling clinicians to retrieve images on computer screens rather than film. Equally important, he linked those images to a patient’s electronic medical record so they can be viewed by many clinicians at one time, and from any facility.

Says Tim Batchelder, MD, Physician-in-Chief, Richmond: “Dr. Navarro is a quiet hero of the digital age of medical imaging in Kaiser Permanente.”