Harvey Picker, who died Saturday at 92, was a wealthy industrialist who switched from running a leading medical supply company to serving as dean of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.

He later became a medical philanthropist and funded the development of survey methods widely used in America and Europe to gauge patient satisfaction.

As president and later chairman of the Picker X-Ray Corp., Picker headed a manufacturing firm with 2,000 employees.

Born December 8, 1915, in New York City, Picker majored in political science at Colgate University. He went on to graduate studies in politics at Oxford University but in 1938 opted to join Picker X-Ray, the company his father had founded in 1914. During World War II, Harvey Picker helped develop mobile X-ray units that could be parachuted into battlefields. Its one-minute film developer was credited with saving lives. At the end of the war, Picker’s father was said to have returned $3 million to the U.S. Treasury Department because he didn’t want to profit from the war. After he was taken off active duty as a Navy deck officer during the war because of an allergy to wool, Picker worked as a liaison between professors at the MIT radiation laboratory and British radar researchers.

After the war, he became the president of Picker X-Ray and guided the company to such developments as explosion-proof units for use in operating rooms — the conjunction of ether and X-ray machinery had occasionally proved disastrous. The corporation became a leader in new diagnostic uses for ultrasound, including fetal monitoring. Picker stepped down as president in 1968, although he remained chairman. In 1982, Picker X-Ray was acquired by General Electric Co. Ltd. of England.

During the 1960s, Picker briefly returned to graduate school at Columbia, then took up a professorship at Colgate, where he had previously served on the board of directors. He was named by President Johnson to the National Science Board, an advisory council, and served on several U.N.commissions. In 1972, he became dean at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia. Noting that his new dean lacked the customary Ph.D., Columbia’s president, William McGill, told the New York Times, “One of the good things about Columbia is that when talent shows itself a plumber’s license is not of fundamental significance.” After presiding over a period of rapid expansion at the International School, Picker became dean emeritus in 1983.

Picker was a long-time devotee of boating and in 1937 was cited by an Oxford coroner’s jury for “gallant conduct” for saving a drowning canoeist on the River Ederwell. Each summer, Picker and his wife, Jean Sovatkin, went exploring Maine coastal waters in his 45-foot ketch, Branta. After leaving Columbia, he bought the Wayfarer Marine Corp., a boatyard in Camden, Maine.

His wife, Jean, had served as a U.N. delegate in the 1960s, and also was co-author with Eleanor Roosevelt of “The United Nations: What You Should Know About It” (1955), as well as author of “Eleanor Roosevelt: Her Day” (1973). It was while watching the care she got during a chronic illness — she had an incurable infection of the head and neck — that Picker decided to fund research making medical care friendlier to patients. His Picker Institute developed “Picker Surveys,” which became known in America and Europe as standard instruments for measuring patient satisfaction. After a period of dormancy, the institute was relaunched in 2003 with a wider focus on patient-centered care.

Picker also gave large gifts to Columbia and Colgate.

In recent years, Picker had an oceanfront estate built in Maine, and continued to sail the Branta. Life, he told the Times of London in 2006, was “a candy store.”

He is survived by two daughters and three grandchildren.