Rachel Idowu, M.D., MPH, spent five weeks in Africa last summer assisting the Ebola outbreak response in Monrovia, Liberia’s capital and most populous city.

People who study health care delivery tend to be interested in the ins and outs of patient information — how it’s gathered, how it’s used. One important focus is provider-to-provider communication associated with patient transitions between care settings.

With research and development costs for many drugs reaching well into the billions, pharmaceutical companies want more than ever to determine whether their drugs already at market have any hidden therapeutic benefits that could warrant putting additional indications on the label and increasing production.

In recent years the federal government has used financial incentives and penalties to promote use of electronic health records (EHR), but in these regulations the issue of EHR data interoperability — that is, data standardization — has been left largely unresolved, dimming prospects for data exchange, population health surveillance and systematic improvement across health networks.

In Tennessee, the introduction in 2010 of a new pneumococcal vaccine for infants and young children coincides with a 27 percent decline in pneumonia hospital admissions across the state among children under age 2.

SmartVU is a new user interface for Vanderbilt’s network application for electronic medical records and clinical workflow, StarPanel.