News

A proposal titled "Capture of Smoking History in EHR for Assessment of Lung Cancer Screening Eligibility" has won the inaugural VCLIC Design Challenge, sponsored by the Vanderbilt Clinical Informatics Center (VCLIC).  Each academic year, VCLIC chooses a focus, this year's being "Making health care more equitable through technology." The center's inaugural design challenge sought to stimulate creative solutions on this theme. 

At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, public health authorities first had to identify and draw attention to common signs and symptoms of the disease.  On Feb. 25, 2020, with 14 cases having been diagnosed in the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) initially went with fever, cough and shortness of breath. This brief official list of coronavirus disease symptoms remained unchanged until mid-April. 

As reported in the journal JMIR Human Factors, Chao Yan, You Chen, PhD, Assistant Professor in DBMI, and colleagues used electronic health records (EHRs) and network analysis to study teamwork in intensive care units at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.  As a starting point, they matched 38 patients admitted to the COVID ICU with 38 similar patients without COVID-19 admitted to the medical ICU. 

Congratulations to the faculty members in the Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI), who were named Fellows of AMIA! They will be inducted into the FAMIA during the AMIA 2021 Virtual Clinical Informatics Conference. See the 10 inductees below:

Avatars, virtual waiting rooms, virtual scribes, in-home testing devices, "syndromatic" facial analysis using AI and machine learning, screen-sharing, and sentiment analysis...There are many exciting innovation possibilities on the horizon that will make telemedicine even more productive, informative, helpful and fun and personable, than current, in-person doctor visits.

Paul Harris, PhD, FACMI, FIAHSI, Director of the VUMC Office of Research Informatics & Professor of Biomedical Informatics & Biomedical Engineering, is seeking a non-tenured faculty member with expertise in clinical and translational research, digital health, predictive modeling and machine learning. 

"I want to change the world, not just at Vanderbilt." 

Eight leaders from across Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) have been named as holders of endowed directorships - three of whom are faculty members in the Department of Biomedical Informatics. Congratulations to Daniel Fabbri, PhD; Cindy Gadd, PhD, MBA, MS, FACMI; and Adam Wright, PhD, FACMI, FAMIA, FIAHSI!