A patient comfort protocol is rendering minor procedures less painful and upsetting for younger outpatients of the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt.

Vanderbilt University Hospital recently earned an “A” Hospital Safety Score from the Leapfrog Group, placing VUH among the safest hospitals in the nation.

In health care, narrative descriptions of symptoms, diseases, injuries, complaints, disabilities and procedures are routinely transformed into numeric or alphanumeric codes, facilitating billing, clinical research and the analysis of health care cost and quality.

The Vanderbilt Breast Center is piloting new measures to ensure continuity of care and timely insurance preauthorization as patients come off grant-sponsored clinical trial protocols and begin or resume standard care.

Neal Patel, M.D., MPH, professor of Clinical Pediatrics and chief medical information officer for inpatient services at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, is the first-place recipient of the 2013 Healthcare Informatics/AMDIS IT Innovation Advocate Award, recognizing leaders who have helped move the health care industry forward through their innovations.

Surgical pathologists are often asked to evaluate tissue samples mid-procedure. These intraoperative consultations entail rapid processing and microscopic evaluation to distinguish diseased tissue from healthy tissue, thus helping guide the surgeon’s hands.