Department of Biomedical Informatics

October 29, 2020

New tool rapidly identifies health records for studies

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.

By Paul Govern
VUMC’s REDCap team helped the Washington State Department of Health ramp up its COVID-19 drive-through testing capabilities. Above, testing is performed in Everett, Washington, in March.
September 24, 2020

REDCap helps state of Washington scale up its testing capacity

Until it was eclipsed by New York in mid-April, the state of Washington had the highest absolute number of COVID-19 cases in the United States.

By Bill Snyder
September 21, 2020

Throwing weight around on the internet

What users mention in online weight loss forum tracks with how much weight they lose.

By Paul Govern
William “Bill” Stead, MD, is stepping down from his role as Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Chief Strategy Officer.
September 17, 2020

Stead to step down from Chief Strategy Officer role after decades of remarkable contributions

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.

By John Howser
August 27, 2020

Study uses AI to sort patient messages by complexity

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.

By Paul Govern
August 27, 2020

Three elected to international health informatics academy

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.

By Paul Govern
July 29, 2020

Study finds patients defer routine health care during pandemic

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%.
By Paul Govern
July 22, 2020

New data offer insights on COVID treatments for people with cancer

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.
By Tom Wilemon
July 20, 2020

Post-surgical bleeding associated with more deaths when compared to blood clots after surgery

Post-surgical bleeding is associated with more deaths than blood clots from surgery, according to a Vanderbilt University Medical Center study published in the journal Anesthesia & Analgesia.
By Craig Boerner
July 16, 2020

Clickbusters program takes on EHR alert fatigue

On April 1, the Vanderbilt Clinical Informatics Center (VCLIC), in coordination with Health IT, launched a grassroots program called Clickbusters to stem alert fatigue at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
By Paul Govern
July 1, 2020

VUMC-led network to focus on polygenic risk for common diseases

With the aid of a $75 million, five-year grant renewal, the Electronic Medical Records and Genomics Network (eMERGE) will venture beyond its current focus on monogenic disease to scoring research participants’ relative risk for complex heritable diseases such as cardiovascular disease, chronic kidney disease and type 2 diabetes.
By Paul Govern
July 1, 2020

Facial recognition solves patient identification: study

Patient misidentification is an all too common cause of medical error. In low- and middle-income countries, free, open-source facial recognition software could provide an economical solution for verifying patient identity across health care settings, according to a study by Martin Were, MD, MS, and colleagues, appearing in the International Journal of Medical Informatics.
By Paul Govern
June 24, 2020

Use of VUMC’s patient portal is surging

Enrollment in the Vanderbilt Health patient portal, My Health at Vanderbilt (MHAV), has surged in recent months.
By Paul Govern
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