News and Happenings

• Congratulations to Aileen Wright, MD, MS, who just received the notice of award for her K23 project “Artificial Intelligence-Assisted Clinical Decision Support for Preventing Hypoglycemia in Hospitalized Patients,” funded by NIDDK. 

• Travis Osterman, DO, MS, appointed VUMC’s new Associate Vice President for Research Informatics!   

• Jessica Ancker, PhD and Adam Wright, PhD are part of a collaboration that received an R01 grant from the National Institute of Aging. In partnership with Vanderbilt University Medical Center, this mixed methods study will develop GEMRA - a machine-learning model designed to identify acute post-ED risk in older adults - into accurate, realtime, EHR-based clinical decision support. The goal is for GEMRA to inform ED-based risk reduction strategies for older adult diseases and vulnerabilities that can be under-recognized in conventional clinical practice. 

• Megan Salwei, PhD was selected as a 2023 NIH mHealth Scholar and will attend the NIH mHealth Training Institute summer (2023) at UCLA. Congrats Megan! 

• Congratulations to Julie Bauml, MD and Aileen Wright, MD, MS for winning the 2023 Physican Builder Award, as part of the eStar Physician Builder Program!   

• Colin Walsh, MD, MA was named to the 2023 Class of Fellows for the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics (IAHSI)! He is one of 24 fellows elected this year. They will be honored at MedInfo 2023 on July 9, 2023. 

• Siru Liu, PhD won the 2023 Vanderbilt Postdoc of the Year Award. It’s given to one postdoc each year for "excellence in research, scholarship or creative expression". Congrats!   

• Congrats to Travis Osterman, DO, MS, and Jonathan Wanderer, MD, MPhil, for being named Associate Chief Medical Information Officers in HealthIT at Vanderbilt University Medical Center! As part of their new duties, Osterman and Wanderer will provide mentoring and guidance to HealthIT clinical directors in their operational IT efforts. 

• Michael Ward, MD, PhD, MBA is MPI on a $3 million implementation science R18 grant recently awarded by AHRQ. CCQIR co-investigators include Adam Wright, PhD, Asli Weitkamp, PhD, Stephen Gradwohl, MD, and Shilo Anders, PhD. 

•  The project is titled "Development of SMART on FHIR interoperable clinical decision support for emergency department patients with pneumonia and pilot deployment into novel Epic electronic health record environments." Congratulations!  

• Allison McCoy, PhD was elected to the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI). Congratulations Allison! 

October 2023 

Siru Liu, PhD was selected as one of 30 rising stars in the field of medical research by STAT Wunderkind, a health sciences newsletter published by the Boston Globe! Read more about Siru’s feature here. 

Sunil Kripalani, MD, MSc & Lindsay Nelson were awarded a R01-equivalent for “Multi-level Initiative to Address Social Drivers of Health (SDoH) in Clinical Practice “as a competitive revision for grant funding the Southeast Collaborative for Innovative and Equitable Solutions to Chronic Disease Disparities (PI, Wilkins). Congrats! 

• This project seeks to understand the optimal approaches for capturing social drivers of health (SDoH) in clinical care processes and evaluate a multi-level initiative that collects and addresses SDoH among patients with multiple medical conditions including type 2 diabetes plus hypertension and/or hyperlipidemia. 

Kevin Johnson, MD, MS received the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award for his project "Helping Doctors Doctor: Using AI to Automate Documentation & De-Autonomate Health Care" 

Congrats to Siru Liu, PhD who was interviewed by the National Library of Medicine to discuss her K99/R00 project “Optimizing Clinical Decision Support Alerts Using Explainable Artificial Intelligence” on camera! Adam Wright, PhD and Allison McCoy, PhD and Peter Embi were happy to be interviewed as well! 

Laurie Novak, PhD and Peter Embí, MD, MS were awarded a grant from the Moore Foundation, working with collaborators from Duke AI Health, the University of Iowa, and the Coalition for Health AI network. The grant aims to support the creation and initial validation of standardized benchmarking tools to enable health systems to internally identify strengths and weaknesses for the development and deployment of AI technology. Congratulations! 

“The Impact of Clinical Decision Support on Health Disparities and the Digital Divide”, a paper by Brian Douthit, PhD, Allison McCoy, PhD and Scott Nelson, PharmD, MS was also mentioned 

Yaa Kumah-Crystal, MD, MPH, MS had the paper “ChatGPT and the Clinical Informatics Board Examination: The End of Unproctored Maintenance of Certification?” mentioned as well! 

Trent Rosenbloom, MD, MPH, FACMI received an AMIA 2023 Leadership Award for his work with 25x5! 

Yaa Kumah-Crystal, MD, MPH, MS and Tom Reese, PharmD, PhD were named as part of the 2024 class of 84 Fellows of AMIA (FAMIA) in the FAMIA Applied Informatics Recognition Program!