This year, Vanderbilt University Medical Center is using a new technology and format for mid-year and annual performance evaluations.

Progress against America’s most intractable health challenges, among them heart disease, cancer and diabetes, requires the best minds, the latest tools and the easy collaboration demanded by 21st century science.

Clinical workstations throughout Vanderbilt University Medical Center will undergo an expansive upgrade early this year. Vanderbilt IT is entering into an operating lease with Dell Inc. to replace a significant number of clinical workstations located throughout VUMC’s hospitals and clinics.

Vanderbilt University Medical Center researchers have found that bathing critically ill patients with disposable chlorhexidine cloths did not decrease the incidence of health care-associated infections when compared to less expensive nonantimicrobial cloths, according to a study appearing online in JAMA this week.

Outside the hospital, use of methadone to treat pain carries a 46 percent increased risk of death when compared to the equally effective but more costly alternative, morphine SR (sustained release).

According to annual figures available through the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Vanderbilt University School of Medicine (VUSM) continues to be ranked among the top 10 in the nation among U.S. medical schools in total grant support provided through the nation’s medical research agency.

Vanderbilt's Heidi Hamm, Ph.D., and L. Jackson Roberts II, M.D., have been lauded by the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET).