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%.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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