Elliot M. Fielstein, PhD

Elliot Fielstein is Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and serves as a software development consultant to Health Informatics Technologies and Services (HITS) at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.  In his clinical role, Dr. Fielstein founded the clinical neuropsychology laboratory at the VA Tennessee Valley Healthcare Center, Nashville where he consulted on general medical, psychiatric and neurologic patient populations.  He also provided supervised training to psychology doctoral students and Vanderbilt psychiatry house staff in psychological and neuropsychological assessment.  As internal software consultant, Dr. Fielstein adapted AJCC cancer staging software, built house staff case-mix tracking tools, and supported development of various clinical and administrative support tools in the Vanderbilt electronic medical record system. 

Dr. Fielstein also maintains an administrative role as Data and Clinical Analytics Manager at VA Central Office, Washington DC.  In this role, Dr. Fielstein has operational responsibility for managing and developing national mental health performance measures, and for developing prototypes of clinical tools that support data-driven decision making to enhance patient care quality.  In a related software development role for the Chief Business Office (CBO), he has built a VA database of disability exams and both designed and developed software for a national study of VA disability exam quality.  He also co-developed internal software for the VA National Center for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder to monitor the PTSD provider consultation program.

His research interests include neuropsychological and psychological consequences of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Head Injury, and mental health informatics, including ways to leverage natural language processing of unstructured data to track clinical symptoms for outcomes evaluation.  Dr. Fielstein also has an active interest in research oversight and human subjects protections, having served 13 years as member on the Vanderbilt Institutional Review Board (IRB).