Tech & Health

The arrival last March of the COVID-19 pandemic in Tennessee presented challenges for the clinical research enterprise at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Prompt recruitment of patients newly diagnosed with COVID-19 into clinical trials was, and remains, a public health imperative with top-level backing from the federal government.

Retrieval of clearer, more complete information from the EHR could go a long way toward improving predictive models of who will next be at risk of suicide, thereby improving care for patients with suicidal thoughts and behaviors.

Health informatics expert and educator Jessica Ancker, PhD, MPH, has joined the Department of Biomedical Informatics as vice chair for Educational Affairs. Ancker comes from Weill Cornell Medical College and Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences, where she was an associate professor.

A post-visit outpatient survey from VUMC’s Department of Neurology, conducted under an ongoing departmental quality improvement initiative, has turned up additional evidence of high satisfaction with telehealth among both patients and clinicians.

An automated system using keyword searches can help identify candidates for clinical trials on adverse drug reactions.

Vanderbilt investigators have devised a system to alert health IT teams to deteriorating performance in clinical prediction models.

According to a new large-scale descriptive study in the journal Pediatrics, for each outpatient encounter, pediatricians on average spend 16 minutes using the electronic health record (EHR).