Department of Biomedical Informatics Archives
Building a cohort, the easy way
Jan. 7, 2021—An automated system using keyword searches can help identify candidates for clinical trials on adverse drug reactions.
COVID-associated delays for elective services studied
Dec. 17, 2020—This spring in the U.S., there were widespread delays in elective health care procedures and screenings. Hospitals, in observance of federal guidelines, were, for a time, conserving beds and protective equipment in preparation for a surge in COVID-19 admissions. And, perhaps on a more prolonged basis, patients in many areas of the country stayed away due to anxiety over catching COVID-19 from other patients or their health care team.
Model students: improving clinical decision-making
Dec. 10, 2020—Vanderbilt investigators have devised a system to alert health IT teams to deteriorating performance in clinical prediction models.
Team tracks sources of false positives in urine drug screens
Dec. 3, 2020—False positives on urine drug screens are common and are frequently due to cross-reactivity of these tests to medications. Last year, Vanderbilt University Medical Center researchers Jacob Hughey, PhD, assistant professor of Biomedical Informatics, and Jennifer Colby, PhD, at that time assistant professor of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology, devised, tested and published a method to systematically identify medications that interfere with screenings for drugs of abuse.
Study tracks physician use of electronic health records
Nov. 4, 2020—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).
New tool rapidly identifies health records for studies
Oct. 29, 2020—Electronic health records (EHR) are increasingly a resource for biomedical discovery, and automated searches for records that reflect a phenotype of interest, typically a disease, are a common starting point.
Throwing weight around on the internet
Sep. 21, 2020—What users mention in online weight loss forum tracks with how much weight they lose.
Stead to step down from Chief Strategy Officer role after decades of remarkable contributions
Sep. 17, 2020—Visionary — someone who thinks about the future or advancements in a creative and imaginative way, a person who is ahead of her or his time and who has a powerful plan for change in the future. Such a person is William “Bill” Stead, MD, Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Chief Strategy Officer, McKesson Foundation Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Professor of Medicine.
Study uses AI to sort patient messages by complexity
Aug. 27, 2020—Taking an interest in electronic message threads between surgical patients and their health care teams, a research group at Vanderbilt University Medical Center has tested how well certain commonly used machine learning algorithms can classify such exchanges according to their clinical decision-making complexity.
Three elected to international health informatics academy
Aug. 27, 2020—Among the 35 new fellows of the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics are three Vanderbilt University Medical Center faculty members — Steven Brown, MD, MS, Bradley Malin, PhD, MS, MPhil, and Martin Were, MD, MS. All three have primary appointments in the Department of Biomedical Informatics.
Study finds patients defer routine health care during pandemic
Jul. 29, 2020—During February and March at two large academic medical centers in Nashville and Boston, screening for high cholesterol and high blood sugar dropped 81-90% and initiation of drug therapy for these conditions dropped 52-60%.
New data offer insights on COVID treatments for people with cancer
Jul. 22, 2020—Newly released data on treatment outcomes of people with cancer diagnosed with COVID-19 reveal a racial disparity in access to Remdesivir, an antiviral drug that has been shown to shorten hospital stays, and increased mortality associated with dexamethasone, a steroid that has had the opposite effect in the general patient population.
