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.

As the United States grapples with a combination of unsustainable growth in health care costs and comparatively lackluster overall population health, Vanderbilt and other leading employers in the region are seeking to improve the value of health care services for their health plan beneficiaries.