A study appearing in the January edition of Pediatrics, led by researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, looks at how Nashville children ages 6 months through 5 years fared over 11 consecutive flu seasons concluding in 2010-11.

In recent months Vanderbilt University Medical Center has begun delivering patient education materials to patients and their care teams using a technology called Infobutton.

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.