Fern FitzHenry, RN, PhD

Fern FitzHenry, RN, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics. Her research interests are in improving the management of pain, the identification of medication errors and adverse events, concept identification in electronic medical records,  the impact on processes of system adoption, natural language processing, and data harmonization for electronic surveillance. At Vanderbilt, she played a central role in building the business case and requirements definition for multiple applications including evaluation of alerts from barcode medication alerts, educational informatics, electronic prescribing, embedding SNOMED coding into structured notes, and surrogates/delegates for the patient portal.

Dr. Fitzhenry is a Fellow in the American College of Healthcare Executives and a retired Colonel from the United States Air Force Reserve.  She holds a graduate degree in business from Northwestern University in addition to her BSN and PhD from the College of Nursing at the University of Illinois at Chicago.