Department of Biomedical Informatics

Vindell Washington, M.D., MHCM, former national coordinator for health information technology with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, spoke at Vanderbilt University Medical Center last week.

Vanderbilt investigators have developed hospital readmission models that may help prevent payment penalties to hospitals when patients are readmitted too soon after discharge.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in 2013 there were 41,149 suicides in the U.S., making it the 10th leading cause of death that year. Among high school students in 2013, the CDC estimates that over the previous 12 months 2.7 percent had sometime made a suicide attempt resulting in injury, poisoning or overdose that required medical attention.

Joshua Denny, M.D., M.S., professor of Biomedical Informatics and associate professor of Medicine at Vanderbilt, has been named to an annual list of the 50 leading experts in health care information technology by Health Data Management, a trade news publication.

It comes down to privacy — biomedical research can’t proceed without human genomic data sharing, and genomic data sharing can’t proceed without some reasonable level of assurance that de-identified data from patients and other research participants will stay de-identified after they’re released for research.

A two-member team from Vanderbilt has won the 2016 iDASH Healthcare Privacy Protection Challenge, a competition open to international participants and devoted this year to privacy protection for genome analysis in a cloud computing environment.

A computer-based method pioneered at Vanderbilt is being used to compare subtypes of rheumatoid arthritis.