The National Institutes of Health have announced the appointment of Kevin Johnson, MD, MS, to the NIH Council of Councils.

Next Up: Yaa Kumah-Crystal, a pediatric endocrinologist and informatician, wants computers to be as seamless in exam rooms as they are in other parts of life.

Vanderbilt surgeons are performing robot-assisted hernia repairs for some patients that help ease recovery.

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.