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Xiaojing Wang, PhD

Xiaojing
Wang
PhD
Research Instructor of Biomedical Informatics

Dr. Xiaojing Wang, PhD, is a research instructor of biomedical informatics in the School of Medicine at Vanderbilt University. Dr. Wang has extensive experience with biological data, including sequencing data analysis and gene expression. Her research focuses on using such resources in parallel with shotgun proteomics data, an emerging field termed proteogenomics, to understand cancer biology. Her current projects include developing bioinformatics methods for proteogenomics studies and its application to human cancer studies. She is heavily involved in the CPTAC project and has close collaborations with the Jim Ayers Institute for Precancer Detection and Diagnosis led by Dr. Daniel C. Liebler. Dr. Wang pioneered the incorporation of transcriptomic data in mass spectrometry data analysis and interpretation. She creatively integrated the genomic data from The Cancer Genome Atlas project and thus built a communication channel between the two national efforts. Using colorectal cancer as a model, she identified protein level variants and other markers. Her approach has important clinical implications. After the publication of her paper in 2011 the proteomics community has highly appreciated her work, and similar analyses have been widely adopted. As part of the first CPTAC analysis working group, her analysis was highlighted in the iconic 2014 nature paper.

Dr. Wang received her Ph.D. in bioinformatics from the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and received postdoctoral training at Vanderbilt University.

2525 West End Avenue
Nashville, TN
37203
xiaojing.wang@Vanderbilt.Edu
WangXiaojingPhD

Yaa Kumah-Crystal, MD, MPH, MS

Yaa
Kumah-Crystal
MD
Associate Professor
Department of Biomedical Informatics
Associate Professor
Department of Pediatric Endocrinology

Background: Yaa Kumah-Crystal, MD, MPH, MS, is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Pediatric Endocrinology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC). Dr. Kumah-Crystal's research focuses on communication and documentation in healthcare, information summarization and visualization, and generative artificial intelligence. She is particularly interested in exploring how these innovations can facilitate communication within the Electronic Health Record (EHR) and assessing their broader implications for health, education, and society.

At Vanderbilt HealthIT, Dr. Kumah-Crystal leads the development of Voice Assistant Technologies to enhance the usability of the EHR through natural language communication. She is the project lead for the Vanderbilt EHR Voice Assistant (VEVA) initiative, which aims to integrate voice user interfaces into the EHR provider workflow. As a Core Design Advisor within VUMC HealthIT, Dr. Kumah-Crystal collaborates across clinical systems to review and advise on EHR change and integration projects, with the goal of optimizing products and processes.

Dr. Kumah-Crystal remains clinically active, supervising Pediatric Endocrine Fellows, Pediatric Residents, and Attending to her own clinic patients. Her research and affiliated publications examine the use of technology to improve care and communication for providers and patients. During the COVID-19 crisis, Dr. Kumah-Crystal partnered with the VUMC Telehealth Taskforce as the Clinical Director in HealthIT for Telemedicine, helping to deploy Telehealth solutions for outpatient and inpatient care delivery, ensuring the continuation of essential care. Dr. Kumah-Crystal and the Telehealth team continue to explore strategies for integrating new remote care models alongside in-clinic visits to address the evolving needs of patients.

Expertise: Dr. Kumah-Crystal's expertise in Clinical Informatics centers on the development, implementation, and evaluation of communication and documentation tools that support clinical care. She is particularly interested in voice interactions with the Electronic Health Record (EHR) and establishing best practices for this emerging modality. Additionally, Dr. Kumah-Crystal investigates techniques for using generative artificial intelligence to facilitate clinical documentation and summaries based on end-user interactions and EHR metadata. Her expertise also extends to the evaluation of diabetes technologies for compliance management and problem-solving.

Twitter: @YaaKumah

2525 West End Avenue
Nashville, TN
37203
yaa.kumah@vumc.org
Kumah-CrystalYaaMD

Robert Cronin, MD, MS

Robert
Cronin
MD
Adjunct Assistant Professor, Biomedical Informatics
Ohio State University
Associate Professor in Internal Medicine and Biomedical Informatics
robert.cronin@osumc.edu
CroninRobertMD

Jing Wang

Jing
Wang
Research Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics

Jing Wang, Ph.D., is a Research Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics in the School of Medicine at Vanderbilt University. His research interests focus on integrating multi-dimensional omics data to understand cancer mechanism. His current work focuses on assessing biological relevance of mRNA and protein profiling data and developing computational tools to discover and interpret novel associations among cancer omics data.

 

Dr. Wang received his Ph.D. in bioinformatics from University of Electronic Science and Technology of China. He received postdoctoral training at Vanderbilt University.

jing.wang.2@vanderbilt.edu
WangJing

Zhongming Zhao, PhD

Zhongming
Zhao
PhD
Adjunct Professor
Department of Biomedical Informatics

Phone
Fax
zhongming.zhao@uth.tmc.edu
ZhaoZhongmingPhD

Wei-Qi Wei, MD, PhD, FAMIA

Wei-Qi
Wei
MD, PhD
Associate Professor
Department of Biomedical Informatics

Wei-Qi Wei, MD, PhD, is an associate professor (tenure track) in Biomedical Informatics in the School of Medicine at Vanderbilt University.  His research focuses on developing new informatics tools/resources to optimize phenotyping performance or enable deep phenotyping through terminology/ontology, NLP, and machine learning. His major work also includes enabling precision medicine through making pharmacogenomics discoveries that may favorably affect a patient’s treatment outcome using big EHR data. His projects are primarily supported by American heart association (AHA) and NIH including R01 and several large U01/P50/U2C grants.

Dr. Wei participated and remain an important role in several significant collaboration research networks. He currently serves as the co-chair of phenotyping working group of the Electronic Medical Records and Genomics (eMERGE) Network and the co-chair of eMERGE NLP working group. He is also a member of the Coordinating Center and the Precision Medicine Initiative's (PMI's, now AllofUS).

Dr. Wei obtained his medical degree from Peking Union Medical College and PhD in health informatics from the University of Minnesota. 

His publications can be found at: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=xuw6dakAAAAJ&hl=en

 

 

615-343-1956
Office Address
2525 West End Avenue
Room / Suite
Suite 1475
Nashville
Tennessee
37203
wei-qi.wei@vumc.org
WeiWei-QiMD, PhD

Firas Hazem Wehbe, MD, PhD

Firas
Hazem
Wehbe
MD, PhD
Chief Research Informatics Officer
Northwestern University
Phone
(312) -503-2311
Fax
750 N. Lake Shore Drive, 11th floor
Chicago
Illinois
60611
WehbeFirasHazemMD, PhD

Kim M. Unertl, PhD, ACHIP, FACMI, FAMIA

Kim
M.
Unertl
PhD
Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies
Department of Biomedical Informatics

Kim Unertl, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics in the School of Medicine at Vanderbilt University. Dr. Unertl received her B.S. in biomedical engineering from Marquette University and M.S. and PhD in biomedical informatics from Vanderbilt University. Her current research focuses on the intersection of health information technology and clinical workflow, including the design and implementation of technology. Dr. Unertl’s primary interest for research settings include chronic disease care and community engagement. She also works toward development of evidence-based strategies for organizational change management during technology implementation.

She is the past chair of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) People and Organizational Issues Working Group (POI-WG) and serves as a member of the AMIA POI-WG Diana Forsythe Award Committee.

Beyond her research, Dr. Unertl is a nationally-recognized leader in development of new pathways into the biomedical informatics field. She directs the Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) summer programs for high school and undergraduate students and is co-PI of DBMI’s NSF-funded Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) site, the Program for Access to Training in Health Informatics (REU-PATHI). She is also co-founder and co-director of the NLM-funded AMIA High School Scholars Program, which brings high school students to the annual AMIA Symposium to present their research and build connections to the biomedical informatics community. She was awarded the DBMI Outstanding Educator Award in 2016 and was inducted into the Vanderbilt School of Medicine’s Academy for Excellence in Education in 2017.

She is currently the At-Large Member of the AMIA Executive Committee and the co-chair of the AMIA DEI Recruitment Subcommittee, and is a member of the AMIA Education Committee and the Women in AMIA Pipeline Subcommittee.

Phone
615-936-5035
Fax
615-936-1427
2525 West End Ave
Room / Suite
1475
kim.unertl@vumc.org
UnertlKimM.PhD

Shane Stenner, MD, MS

Shane
Stenner
MD, MS
Associate Professor
Department of Biomedical Informatics
Associate Professor
Department of Medicine
Associate Dean for Education Design and Informatics
Vanderbilt University School of Medicine
Phone
(615) 875-8678
shane.stenner@vumc.org

Shane Stenner, MD, MS joined the VUMC Department of Biomedical Informatics and Department of Medicine in September 2011, commencing over a decade of local applied clinical informatics leadership and national-level recognition. Dr. Stenner began his career at VUMC as an Ambulatory Adult Primary Care Provider, a Supervising Attending in the Internal Medicine Resident Clinic, and as Program Director for Evidence-based Medicine Implementation in HealthIT. Over the next two years he quickly assumed responsibility for major clinical production systems as the Product Director of both RxStar, VUMC’s custom developed electronic prescribing system, and VOOM, VUMC’s custom outpatient order entry and charge capture system.

Dr. Stenner led eight developers and analysts on the RxStar team and applied agile development methodologies to quickly respond to the priorities of clinical and pharmacy leadership and end users. Notably, he designed and specified features that significantly improved prescribing quality and safety and decreased costs across the enterprise, as described in several peer-reviewed publications. With the VOOM team, Dr. Stenner was responsible for all Ambulatory orders and charge capture features and functionality at VUMC. He successfully led the team of fifteen developers and analysts through a significant deployment effort across the enterprise to meet Meaningful Use requirements and later designed and specified features that facilitated successful ICD-10 adoption at VUMC.

In 2016 Dr. Stenner was tasked as Ambulatory Director of VUMC’s ambitious two-year, multi-hospital Epic electronic health record implementation and “big bang” go-live. He led a team of over 40 builders and consultants, with a team project budget of over $10 million, to a successful go-live. Dr. Stenner advised and supported program leaders, executive and operational leaders, subject matter experts, and stakeholders through design, build, and go-live readiness decisions.

In 2018, Dr. Stenner was promoted to Senior Director of Clinical Informatics in the Office of the Chief Health Information Officer, a role in which he led clinical informatics enterprise projects at VUMC, helping to understand technical and workflow challenges, communicate with Clinical Operational and Health IT Executive Leadership, set targeted strategic direction, guide requests and issues through governance, and advise best practices. More recently, Dr. Stenner established the VUMC Clinician Informatics Committee to centralize governance for clinically impactful requests and topics and he has helped lead VUMC’s efforts to meet interoperability requirements of the 21st Century Cures Act.  

Dr. Stenner has continually supported the education mission of VUMC, serving as the Capstone Director of the DBMI Masters of Applied Clinical Informatics program from the program’s inception through 2021 and he has delivered regular lectures in the Department of Biomedical Informatics and School of Medicine.

Throughout his career Dr. Stenner has been increasingly involved and recognized in the regional community and at the national level. Locally, Dr. Stenner has served on the Tennessee Health Information Management System Society (TN HIMSS) Board of Directors, led the TN HIMSS CXO Initiative Steering Committee, and has been an invited panel member at the TN HIMSS Conference. Nationally, Dr. Stenner has worked closely with leading national vendors in his domain such as First Data Bank, (medication terminology), Surescripts (e-prescribing interoperability), and Nuance (voice recognition). He is an Epic-certified Physician Builder and has spoken at Epic’s national Expert Group Meeting. Dr. Stenner has advocated nationally for changes to the National Council for Prescription Drug Programs’ SCRIPT e-prescribing standard and served on the Scientific Program Committee for the American Medical Informatics Association’s Annual Symposium. Dr. Stenner has been an invited speaker and panel member at national meetings for First Data Bank and Surescripts and has long served on national advisory committees for these industry leaders.

Dr. Stenner’s decade of local applied clinical informatics leadership and national level recognition ultimately led to an executive level leadership opportunity in September 2021 when he was named the Associate Dean for Education Design and Informatics (EDI) at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine (VUSM). Dr. Stenner is supporting Vanderbilt as a leader and innovator in medical education by creating a vision for the expanding role of educational informatics necessary to deliver on the promise of personalized, data-driven, competency-based education. Locally he is leading the rebuild of VUSM’s custom digital learning platform and designing an educational data architecture that will be foundational to building a learning education system, implementing precision education, and supporting education-related innovation and research. Nationally, Dr. Stenner is expanding his presence and recognition, ensuring that Vanderbilt is engaged in the Association of American Medical College’s (AAMC) Group on Information Resources (GIR) Conference, participating as a member of the AAMC GIR Data Driven Academic Medical Centers Work Group, and active as a member of the MedBiquitous educational standards development program of the AAMC.

Dr. Stenner aims to establish Vanderbilt as a national leader of Precision Education by demonstrating successful precision education interventions in a learning health system environment. He is convinced that a learner-centric model which emphasizes professional learner outcomes and life-long learning is critical to achieving optimized patient outcomes. Dr. Stenner envisions a future in which Vanderbilt-authored educational technologies empower master adaptive learners around the world, ensuring learners’ educational data and artifacts are interoperable, longitudinal, personalized, adaptive, and enduring.

Google Scholar Citations

StennerShaneMD, MS

William W. Stead, MD, FACMI, FIAHSI

William
W.
Stead
MD, FACMI
McKesson Foundation Professor
Department of Biomedical Informatics
Professor
Department of Medicine

William Stead, MD, FACMI, is McKesson Foundation Professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) and Professor of Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC). He is recognized internationally as one of the founders of biomedical informatics and he has built his career on envisioning the long-term potential of informatics and computation to transform health, biomedicine and research, and testing those ideas. 

Dr. Stead received his B.A., M.D., and residency training in Internal Medicine and Nephrology from Duke University.  He joined Duke’s faculty in Nephrology where he co-developed The Medical Record (TMR), one of the first practical electronic medical record systems, and established a NIH-funded research program on advanced information system architectures. 

Dr. Stead was recruited to VUMC in 1991 and guided the development of the Department of Biomedical Informatics and operational units providing information infrastructure to support health care, education, and research programs of the Medical Center.  He aligned organizational structure, informatics architecture and change management to bring cutting-edge research in decision support, visualization, natural language processing, data mining, and data privacy into clinical practice. 

In the 2000’s, Dr. Stead implemented the DesignShop methods for rapid-cycle group creative work to support the shift to system-based care, learning and research to move toward Vanderbilt’s goals of personalized medicine and population health management.  As VUMC’s Chief Strategy Officer during the 2010’s, he scaled this work to facilitate fundamental shifts in governance and operation of organizational processes, quality improvement and research, and medical education and training. 

In 2021, Dr. Stead stepped down from his executive role to focus on mentoring the next generation and pursuing research to explore the feasibility of scaling rigorous diagnostic and prognostic prediction research across the health system by annealing population scale data and high throughput computational methods with targeted EHR-enabled clinical epidemiology studies. 

Dr. Stead is a founding fellow of both the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI) and the American Institute for Engineering in Biology and Medicine, a founding member of the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics, and a member of the National Academy of Medicine. He is a recipient of numerous awards and distinctions, including being named the first recipient of AMIA’s Donald AB Lindberg Award for Innovation in Informatics in 2005, receiving ACMI’s Morris F. Collen Award of Excellence in 2007, and in 2013, being named the first recipient of the AMIA’s William W. Stead Award for Thought Leadership in Informatics, which was created in his honor.

He has served many other leadership roles throughout his career, including president of the American College of Medical Informatics, founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, chair of the Board of Regents of the National Library of Medicine, presidential appointee to the Commission on Systemic Interoperability, chair of the National Academies’ Committee on Engaging the Computer Science Research Community in Health Care Informatics, chair of the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics and chair of the American Medical Association’s Journal Oversight Committee.

In addition to his academic and advisory responsibilities, Dr. Stead is a Director of HealthStream, a health care solutions organization aimed at improving patient outcomes through clinical workforce development, management, and training.

Read more about Dr. Stead here

Phone
615-936-1424
2525 West End Ave.
Room / Suite
Rm 12512
Nashville
Tennessee
37203
bill.stead@vumc.org
SteadWilliamW. MD