Jeremy Warner, M.D., M.S., assistant professor of Medicine and Biomedical Informatics, has been named medical director of the Vanderbilt Cancer Registry at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center (VICC).
In this newly created position, Warner will work closely with Dauphne McGavic, MSN, R.N., CTR, who recently was appointed program manager of the Registry.
The Vanderbilt Cancer Registry was founded in the mid-1930s and is the official repository for data about cancer cases at VICC. The registry staff tracks the number of new cancer patients each year, the type of cancer at diagnosis, the state and county of residence and the health care outcomes for each patient. There are more than 90,000 case histories in the database.
This official data is reported to state and federal agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and it provides a rich source of information about trends in cancer diagnoses and disease outcomes.
“Cancer registrars serve a vital and sometimes unrecognized role in the curation and abstraction of data relating to cancer patients diagnosed or treated at Vanderbilt,” Warner said.
“Due in large part to their efforts, VICC received a commendation during the most recent Commission on Cancer re-accreditation. I look forward to working with the registrars, VICC operations and cancer researchers to make the very most that we can from this invaluable data source.”
Warner will assist the staff in identifying and developing new informatics methods to improve the accuracy and timeliness of the data collection process, including strategies to connect with current and future electronic medical record systems. He will be involved in assessing diagnoses that are difficult to categorize as a specific form of cancer and will serve as a liaison between clinicians and the registry staff.
“Our Cancer Registry maintains one of the oldest longitudinal databases at Vanderbilt, which is a leader in the collection and utilization of de-identified patient data. These databases provide important information that is especially useful for health care investigators,” Warner said.
Warner earned a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, and a Master of Science degree at the University of California, San Diego, before receiving his M.D. at Boston University.
He completed an internship and residency in Internal Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco and a fellowship in Hematology and Oncology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, in Boston. He joined the faculty at Vanderbilt in 2012.