News

Vanderbilt University Medical Center is partnering with Yale School of Medicine, Morehouse School of Medicine and the Research Centers in Minority Institutions Coordinating Center (RCMI CC) at the Morehouse School of Medicine in an initiative aimed at increasing diversity in clinical trials and addressing systemic barriers to participation by communities of color.

Vanderbilt University Medical Center has received a five-year, $4.5 million grant from the National Human Genome Research Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, to assess clinical outcomes and economic value of screening large, diverse health care populations for disease risk using polygenic risk scores. A polygenic risk score (PRS) uses hundreds to thousands of genetic variants in a person’s genome to measure genetic risk for a given disease.

We are excited to open this year's application window for the 2022-2023 DBMI Catalyzing Informatics Innovation (CI2) program. The CI2 program supports faculty in the development of early-stage, innovative and impactful informatics-based projects that have the potential to improve health, healthcare, or discovery. The CI2 Program awardees receive not only modest funding to pursue their proposed project, but also join a cohort of CI2 Fellows who work closely with faculty and VUMC leadership. 

The Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) Department of Biomedical Informatics's (DBMI) monthly newsletter, DBMI Digest, is now available to view. Read the June 2022 DBMI Digest here. Each DBMI Digest features department & faculty announcements, awards & appointments, educational & HR updates, funding opportunities and more. Each issue also includes a profile of one of our faculty, staff, postdocs and students. 

In 2003, Dan Roden, MD, then director of the Division of Clinical Pharmacology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, imagined a large-scale biobank integrated with electronic health records to help doctors “personalize” medical care for their patients.

Vanderbilt’s Fellowship Program in Clinical Informatics is a two-year program with both didactic and rotational training. This two-year fellowship is open to physicians who are ABMS board certified or board eligible in a primary specialty (e.g.

Women who need a liver transplant are more likely to spend more time on a waiting list, become too sick for transplant or die compared to men. To improve equity, a recently published Vanderbilt-led study suggests a sex adjustment to criteria for MELD (model for end-stage liver disease), which determines allocation of transplanted livers. The paper, “Proposing a Sex-Adjusted Sodium-Adjusted MELD Score for Liver Transplant Allocation” appears in JAMA Surgery.

The drug naloxone can rapidly reverse an opioid overdose. In 2016 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended that clinicians prescribing opioids for chronic pain consider coprescribing naloxone in patients with higher opioid dosages, a history of substance use disorder or overdose, or a concurrent benzodiazepine prescription. 

Bradley Malin, PhD, Accenture  Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Biostatistics and Computer Science at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, has received the Lasting Research Award from the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) annual Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy (CODASPY). The award was presented April 25 at CODASPY, held this year in Hanover, Maryland.

Vanderbilt University School of Nursing Assistant Professor Alvin Jeffery is one of 12 nurse scientists accepted into the third cohort of the Betty Irene Moore Fellowship for Nurse Leaders and Innovators.