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.

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.

A study group of more than 600,000 patients with type 2 diabetes, identified from electronic medical records in the PCORnet national research network, could be valuable for assessing the safety of type 2 diabetes drugs.

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).

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.

The National Cancer Institute (NCI) has funded the development of interactive visual tools that will allow researchers to extract cancer phenotypes from electronic medical records.

Vanderbilt University Medical Center is working toward a Nov. 1 date to comply with key parts of new federal rules issued by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), as part of the 21st Century Cures Act.