Nancy Lorenzi, Ph.D., assistant vice chancellor for Health Affairs and professor of Biomedical Informatics, has received the Morris F. Collen Award of Excellence, internationally recognized as the capstone award in biomedical informatics.
The award is given annually by the American College of Medical Informatics to an individual “whose personal commitment and dedication to medical informatics has made a lasting impression on health care and biomedicine.”
Lorenzi received the award earlier this month at the American Medical Informatics Association Annual Symposium in Chicago.
“I am indeed honored to receive this award from colleagues at the college. I am grateful, as always, to the many staff and faculty members across the Medical Center with whom I’ve worked, and with whom I continue to learn and to discover. Vanderbilt is a collaborative institution if ever there was one, and I remain gratified by the vigor and excitement of biomedical informatics and organizational change as pursued here at VUMC,” Lorenzi said.
Lorenzi’s research is focused on implementation and adoption of information technology, including organizational behavior and impact, leadership adaptability and strategies for physician involvement and acceptance.
Through partnerships with clinical leaders, physicians and nurses, Lorenzi and her colleagues at the Informatics Center and the Department of Biomedical Informatics have helped make Vanderbilt University Medical Center a leading test bed for the use of computers in clinical settings and biomedical research.
“Nancy first and foremost is a people person. She can listen, connect. It doesn’t matter whether she’s talking with a senior executive, to a starting student or to a very angry user. She can immediately recognize the comfort level of an individual, whether they’re a person that can drive change, that can extend change, or whether they’ll actually resist change, so, she can match them to the right part,” said Bill Stead, M.D., associate vice chancellor for Health Affairs and chief strategy and information officer, in a video tribute to Lorenzi produced by the American Medical Informatics Association. (Stead won the Collen Award in 2007.)
Kevin Johnson, M.D., M.S., professor and chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics, said, “Nancy approaches technological change through a special understanding of people and process, which has made her influential both in our field internationally and here at VUMC. I join colleagues in congratulating Nancy on this richly deserved award.”
Lorenzi is a past president of the Medical Library Association and the International Medical Informatics Association, and served as chair of the board of directors of the American Medical Informatics Association in 2010 and 2011. She joined Vanderbilt in 2000.
