To accommodate weekday and seasonal variations in case volume, continual adjustment of operating room resources is imperative. Unlike other health systems, at Vanderbilt Health the OR planning process taps into predictive analytics running automatically on the back of the OR scheduling system.

The Vanderbilt Institute for Surgery and Engineering (VISE) team of Robert Webster III, PhD, and Duke Herrell, MD, have received a $2.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop a new surgical robot for endoscopic transurethral prostatectomy.

Over the past few decades the electronic health record (EHR) has become an object of intensive study, opening new ground in biomedical research. Natural language sections of the EHR, such as physician’s notes and health team messages, are a rich vein for research, but patient privacy considerations entail first scrubbing patient identifiers from these notes and messages. Historically, this has been accomplished through large, complex software systems that are expensive to develop and maintain.

Vanderbilt LifeFlight is known for transporting critically injured patients to Vanderbilt University Medical Center while providing emergency care with little to no medical information about its patients.

Some biomedical researchers may be unsure about routine electronic health record (EHR) data and how useful it ultimately may prove for drawing meaningful, actionable associations that warrant changes to clinical practice and lead to improved clinical outcomes.

Around two-thirds of patients treated for breast cancer will have had hormone-sensitive tumors and, after their initial treatment, will be advised to undergo hormone therapy for five to 10 years to prevent recurrence.