Current Fellows
Ashley Spann MD, MSACI
Senior Fellow
Primary Specialty: Gastroenterology
Capstone Project: Automated identification and Risk Stratification of Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease
Primary Interests: Data Analytics, Machine Learning, Clinical Decision Support, Implementation Science
Casey Distaso MD, MPH
Junior Fellow
Primary Specialty: Emergency Medicine
Informatics Background: Casey was first introduced to informatics through research at the National Center for Human Factors in Healthcare
Primary Interests: Human Factors Engineering, User Centered Design, Workflow Optimization
Former Fellows
Jake Lancaster, MD, MHA, MSACI, FAMIA
Primary Specialty: Internal Medicine
Current Role: Chief Medical Information Officer at Baptist Memorial Health Care Corporation and Chief Medical Officer for the Baptist Medical Group
Claude Pirtle MD, MSACI, FACP, FAMIA
Primary Specialty: Internal Medicine
Current Roles: Vice President, Chief Medical Information Officer and Assistant Chief Medical Officer at West Tennessee Healthcare
Robert Turer MD, MSE, MSACI
Primary Specialty: Emergency Medicine
Current Role: Assistant Professor, Department of Emergency Medicine and Clinical Informatics Center, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas TX
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Dr. Jake Lancaster is the Chief Medical Information Officer for Baptist Memorial Health Care Corporation and the Chief Medical Officer for the Baptist Medical Group. The Baptist system based out of Memphis consists of 22 hospitals and 190 clinics spread throughout Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas. His capstone project involved developing a patient facing smartphone app used by inpatients to track their care team. The problem that he attempted to solve was that there are numerous people who care for a patient throughout their hospitalization, and it is difficult for the patient to keep track of who they are and what their role is. The app provided pictures of their doctors along with their names, specialty, and a brief bio. The app also provided a dictionary of commonly used terms that patients may not be familiar with such as resident, intern, fellow, and attending. The app connected with the EHR via FHIR, and the care team on the phone mirrored the care team in the EHR. The project allowed him to see the full timeline of an application from development to launch and gain technical experience with coding and change management.
Dr. Claude Pirtle currently serves as the Vice President and Chief Medical Information Officer of West Tennessee Healthcare in Jackson, Tennessee. Dr. Pirtle also serves as the Assistant Chief Medical Officer of Jackson Madison County General Hospital, which is the 692-bed flagship hospital of West Tennessee Healthcare. He is also a practicing internist at the Lift Health Clinic in downtown Jackson. While participating in the MSACI degree, he chose to focus his capstone work on improving the quality of care provided to each patient and cost savings by improving the usage of oral medications in the inpatient setting. He designed a randomized control trial to study if providing actionable feedback to providers at the point of care would increase the conversion of intravenous medications (IV) to an oral (PO) equivalent. Primary endpoints of the study included the number of doses of candidate medications administered IV and PO after the alert. Secondary endpoints included the number of doses of other medications not in our IV to PO list that were converted, cost savings, presence of an IV drip, episodes of life-threatening infections, length of stay, and medications changed from IV to oral form by pharmacy.
Dr. Robert Turer’s capstone project, “Implementing a Point-of-Care Prognostic Model in Pediatric Emergency Patients with Pneumonia” focused on the intersection of user-centered design and predictive analytics. In this project, he led a team of informaticists, human factors experts, software developers, and EHR analysts to design, implement, and integrate a custom application that displayed prognostic information for children presenting to the emergency department with pneumonia for use as part of a randomized controlled trial. This project showcased VUMC’s custom development capabilities and culminated in a JavaScript/Angular application harnessing SMART on FHIR to directly integrate with the Epic EHR at VUMC and with the Cerner EHR at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh.