Department of Biomedical Informatics Archives
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.
Post-surgical bleeding associated with more deaths when compared to blood clots after surgery
Jul. 20, 2020—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.
Clickbusters program takes on EHR alert fatigue
Jul. 16, 2020—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.
Facial recognition solves patient identification: study
Jul. 1, 2020—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.
VUMC’s REDCap serves pandemic response around the world
Jun. 9, 2020—REDCap, the research data management tool created and powered by Vanderbilt University Medical Center, is serving extra duty as research teams and public health authorities around the world grapple with the COVID-19 pandemic.
When rankings are unfounded
Jun. 8, 2020—There are many good reasons to survey anesthesiology patient satisfaction but ranking individual clinicians isn’t one of them, the authors of a new study conclude.
Team to develop patient data sharing framework for pandemics
May. 21, 2020—Any large-scale effort to use data from COVID-19 patients to serve biomedical or public health research must first concern itself with patient privacy issues.
Yin receives early investigator MERIT Award from NCI
May. 14, 2020—Zhijun Yin, PhD, assistant professor of Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, has received the National Cancer Institute’s Method to Extend Research in Time Award (or MERIT Award) for Early Stage Investigators.
Initiative to explore COVID-19 outcomes in cancer patients
Apr. 30, 2020—A multi-institutional consortium led by Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center (VICC) is collecting data on cancer patients with COVID-19 as part of a rapid effort to understand the unique effects the coronavirus has on this vulnerable population.
