“There and Home Again, Safely: 5 Responsibilities of Ambulatory Practices in High Quality Care Transitions,” a new white paper from the American Medical Association (AMA), is the work of a 19-member expert panel that included two Vanderbilt faculty members — Sunil Kripalani, M.D., M.Sc., associate professor of Medicine, and Amanda Salanitro M.D., MS, MSPH, instructor in Medicine, both from the section of Hospital Medicine in the Department of Medicine’s Division of General Internal Medicine and Public Health.

Vanderbilt’s Department of Biomedical Informatics remains exceptionally well represented on the nine-member executive committee of the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI).

On Jan. 10, the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit at the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt reached impressive new territory — 365 days without a single case of central line associated blood stream infection (CLABSI), catheter associated urinary tract infection (CAUTI) or ventilator associated pneumonia (VAP).

On Jan. 15, an information systems glitch rendered Vanderbilt Outpatient Orders Management, or VOOM, temporarily unavailable for some users. Shubhada Jagasia, M.D., MMHC, medical director of the Eskind Diabetes Clinic, was among clinicians who suddenly had to return to using paper forms to order clinical labs, radiology and other diagnostic tests.

Within StarPanel, the medical records system used at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, patient care team members each have an electronic message “basket,” making it simple to store messages and link them to medical records.

Leaders with West Tennessee Healthcare (WTH) and Vanderbilt University Medical Center announced an affiliation agreement that will expand the scope of health care services in West Tennessee Healthcare’s service area.