Tucked in a data center in the basement of Vanderbilt University Hospital, a new computer the size of a large armoire, called a data warehouse appliance, is delivering a new order of speed to Vanderbilt clinical scientists as they search, filter, analyze and annotate the de-identified medical records of approximately 2 million patients.

Diagnostic codes used for billing purposes effectively identify smokers in a general clinic population and can be used to adjust smoking status in genetic and epidemiologic studies.

Blackford Middleton, M.D., MPH, M.Sc., corporate director of clinical informatics research and development at Partners Healthcare in Boston, will join Vanderbilt later this month in the role of assistant vice chancellor for Health Affairs and chief informatics officer for Vanderbilt University Health System. He succeeds John Doulis, M.D.

Vanderbilt’s Department of Biomedical Informatics remains exceptionally well represented on the nine-member executive committee of the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI).

Nancy Lorenzi, Ph.D., assistant vice chancellor for Health Affairs and professor of Biomedical Informatics, has received the Morris F. Collen Award of Excellence, internationally recognized as the capstone award in biomedical informatics.

Shelagh Mulvaney, Ph.D., assistant professor of Nursing, leads a national team of researchers, engineers and designers that recently landed a $1.8 million federal grant to identify new ways to teach critical problem-solving skills to teenagers with type 1 diabetes using an Internet and mobile phone-based system.

R. Daniel Beauchamp, M.D., chair of the Section of Surgical Sciences, and Sten Vermund, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Vanderbilt Institute for Global Health, have been elected to the Institute of Medicine (IOM), the organization announced this week.