Holly Fletcher

Various instruments sit out for use during a heart transplant surgery on Jan. 15. (photo by Erin O. Smith)
January 31, 2025

How many surgical instruments are used to set the 2024 heart transplant world record?

A standard heart transplant requires surgical instruments spread across multiple sterile tables — from tiny vascular clamps to hefty retractors to keep the surgical field open.

By Holly Fletcher and Erin O. Smith
This lithographic illustration depicts the Vanderbilt Medical School building in downtown Nashville in 1895. (Historic Images of VUMC, EBL Special Collections)
January 29, 2025

Leadership Assembly: VUMC’s 150 years of care, growth and expansion

Today’s VUMC is closely intertwined with the booming geographic region it calls home, resulting in a relationship that both demands and fuels the institution’s rapid growth.

By Holly Fletcher
November 21, 2024

Health Professional Solutions joins Aegis Ventures’ Digital Consortium

Consortium members will identify key health care challenges and codevelop targeted solutions that improve patient outcomes and health care efficiency. 
October 28, 2024

New research highlights economic and employment challenges for parents of medically complex babies

The study highlights that having a preterm baby often forces parents to consider leaving their job, a decision that typically involves changes to health insurance plans and networks, and resets the annual out-of-pocket costs a worker incurs.

By Holly Fletcher
October 22, 2024

Commodore spirit proves too much for superfan’s blood vessels

While most sports injuries happen on the field, one Vanderbilt football fan managed to score one in his own home the night Vanderbilt beat Alabama.

By Holly Fletcher
Cora Beth Enzor, PharmD, left, and Elizabeth Cherry, PharmD. (photo by Susan Urmy)
October 8, 2024

Vanderbilt Health Rx Solutions introduces service to bridge gap between health systems and pharmaceutical manufacturers

The new consulting service will offer robust capabilities in understanding the provider journey, prescription journey, data capabilities and best practice sharing.

By Holly Fletcher
October 3, 2024

Q&A: Jeffrey Upperman on the need to emphasize the impact of disasters on children to improve responses, care

Jeffrey Upperman, a national leader in pediatric trauma and disaster preparedness, is among the authors of the Pediatric Disaster Science Series from the National Academy of Medicine that published in late September as scenes of Hurricane Helene’s devastation emerged across the Southeast, underscoring the need to formalize response, research and care efforts.
By Holly Fletcher
September 25, 2024

Vanderbilt’s Douglas Terry named Senior Director of Research for the National Football League

The role will concentrate on several initiatives meant to enhance the health and safety of NFL players and is an extension of Terry’s expertise and work on sport-related concussion and cumulative head impacts.
By Holly Fletcher
September 23, 2024

New study reveals common belief of CTE, link to mental health among former professional NFL players

“Understanding the proportion of former players who think they have CTE — and identifying the common symptoms in those who believe they have CTE — is an important step for helping these individuals receive medical and mental health treatment,” said Douglas Terry, PhD, assistant professor and clinical neuropsychologist in the Department of Neurological Surgery and co-director of the Vanderbilt Sports Concussion Center.
By Holly Fletcher
September 18, 2024

Embracing lifelong learning for a growth mindset: Leadership Assembly

VUMC’s storied history of delivering high quality, personalized care, groundbreaking research and training underpins an initiative to implement a lifelong learning framework to strengthen the agility of its people.
By Holly Fletcher
September 4, 2024

Get app-y: scenes from VUMC Nursing’s Code Academy ‘hackathon’

A week of Code Academy focused on solving problems in nursing got tackled with lots of giggles, games, coding — and savvy questions about what it's like to be a nurse.
By Holly Fletcher
August 28, 2024

For former NFL players, football before age 12 not linked to worse health later in life: study

Data from 4,189 former NFL athletes who spanned the ages of 24-89 show no evidence playing organized football younger than age 12 led to more cognitive, mood, sleep, cardiovascular or other health issues later in life. These results, which are published in Sports Medicine, contrast with previous small studies from a decade ago.
By Holly Fletcher
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