Department of Biomedical Informatics

December 3, 2020

Team tracks sources of false positives in urine drug screens

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.

By Paul Govern
The End of Life Care Plan is easily accessible on My Health at Vanderbilt.
December 2, 2020

My Health at Vanderbilt adds End of Life Care Plan

Improvements to the web-based My Health at Vanderbilt, Vanderbilt Health’s online patient portal, have made it easier for health care teams — including patients and their designated health agents — to add and access an End of Life Care Plan to guide medical decision making.

By Jill Clendening
November 5, 2020

Screening younger women for hereditary cancers may be cost effective

Population-wide screening for genetic variants linked to hereditary breast and ovarian cancer may be cost effective in women between the ages of 20 and 35, according to a study published in JAMA Network Open.

By Tom Wilemon
November 4, 2020

Study tracks physician use of electronic health records

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).

By Paul Govern
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
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
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