I completed my undergraduate studies in Biomedical
Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. I continued on at Washington University in the School of Medicine, where I obtained my Medical Doctorate and a Master of Science in Clinical Investigation. I completed my Pediatric Residency at St. Louis Children’s hospital and recently completed my fellowship training in Pediatric Emergency Medicine at Children’s Hospital
Colorado. I am excited to be joining the faculty at Vanderbilt in the Department of Pediatrics and the Division of Pediatric Emergency Medicine this summer.

My passion for clinical informatics has grown over the years through my research experiences with modeling large patient databases, optimizing information retrieval in the EHR, evaluating diagnostic errors, and user‐centered design related to antimicrobial stewardship. I am most excited about learning best practices to develop clinical decision support tools to improve
quality of care, efficiency, and satisfaction in the busy
environment of the emergency room. I have pursued further training in Design Thinking and Machine Learning recently through online courses to support this goal.

When I have needed a break during the past decade and a half of education and training, I am usually traveling. My wife Amanda and our four year old daughter Mila are always down for a hike or exploring somewhere new. When I am in town, I always enjoy meeting up to brainstorm ideas over coffee or a
beer.

I am excited to be joining the DBMI community at Vanderbilt! A
little about myself, I grew up in Huntsville, Alabama and about
15 years ago I moved Greenville, South Carolina where I call the
Upstate home. I went to undergrad at Bob Jones University and
medical school at the University of South Carolina School of
Medicine Greenville. I will be finishing my family medicine
residency in June at Prisma Health and subsequently working as
an outpatient position with Spartanburg Regional Healthcare
System. The work I am able to do in caring for my patients has
fueled my interest within clinical informatics, to improve the
technology physicians and patients interact with when it comes
to providing health care.

Growing up and working in the upstate of South Carolina lends
itself to a variety of outdoor activities. If I am not caring for
patients, you will usually find me hiking the Blue Ridge
Mountains, kayaking, trail running or gardening. I enjoy deep sea
fishing with my siblings and spending time with my church
family. I also travel overseas for medical mission trips where I
have the opportunity to treat patients and teach medical
students.

During my training as a medical student and resident, I realized
how much time I spent in front of a computer documenting and
searching information in the electronic medical record to care
for my patients. I also realized that many physicians have
become weary and burnout due to the time spent with the EMR;
and this is where my interests lie. I want to learn tools to
improve the physician experience with the EMR and leverage
the technology to better care for my patient population. I also
have interests with improving clinical workflow to enrich the
physician and patient interaction and ultimately increase
revenue. I look forward to learning about different tools that my
colleagues have used within their clinical enterprises and share
ideas on how to improve the clinical experience.

https://medicine.vumc.org/person/jacob-franco-md

Fall 2020-Spring 2022

I grew up in Chappaqua, New York, where not much happens. To pass the time, I took a computer science class in high school and fell in love with it. My passion for programming brought me to Brown University, where I was poised to be a software engineer. That is, until a fateful internship showed me the horrors of pure cubicle work day in and day out. I realized I wanted to work with people, so I completed a degree in Computational Biology. This brought me to Stony Brook School of Medicine. At Stony Brook, my initial passion came through again, as I made an iPhone app for a urologist and also created a sorting program to assign my fellow students into their preferred rotations. 

I completed Internal Medicine Residency at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in 2019 and started work as a Hospitalist at Vanderbilt that year. I rediscovered my passion for programming and algorithms and took the role of Epic Clinician Champion for the Hospitalist Department. Multiple committees and several Grand Rounds presentations later, I found that I would need a deeper understanding to make true change. I completed the basic and advanced builder courses at Epic and am now completing the Master's of Science in Applied Clinical Informatics (MSACI) program to further help my institution and department. 

I am looking forward to joining the DBMI community this
summer for the MSACI program. Keeping patients free from
complications and out of the hospital has always been a sign of
good and proactive medicine, but in times of COVID and strained
budgets this takes on an ever greater importance both in terms
of patient safety and stewardship of resources. As an oncologist
at TN Oncology my patients are often particularly vulnerable and
I believe that integration and analysis of the wealth of data
generated on a daily basis will allow me to
develop clinical decision support systems to identify those at
highest risk for complications, tailor treatments based on clinical
and genetic/genomic characteristics and potentially de‐escalate
treatment intensity where appropriate.

Prior to coming to TN Oncology, I completed residency and
fellowship training in Oncology and Pulmonary and Critical Care
Medicine at Johns Hopkins and held faculty appointments at
Johns Hopkins and Emory University. My research focused on
the identification of epigenetic mechanisms in lung
carcinogenesis and resistance to treatment and I used large
scale analysis of data form the Department of Veterans affairs to
validate hypotheses generated in the laboratory. Specifically,
we studied cancer risk after exposure to several potentially
preventative treatment interventions.

Personally, I enjoy running, mountain biking and music.
Recently, my eleven year old son has started challenging me in
complicated strategy games.