Company Profile

Company Overview

Vanderbilt University School of Medicine's Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) is an internationally recognized leader in biomedical informatics, with strong relationships to academic departments in the university and the clinical operations of a large medical center. DBMI has an emphasis on interdisciplinary research, with a focus on health information technology development, clinical knowledge and workflow modeling, implementation sciences, machine learning and clinical decision support, biomedical data analytics (clinical, genomic, and proteomic), and natural language processing, privacy and security.

Among more than 70 faculty are five members of the Institute of Medicine / National Academy of Sciences and more than a dozen members of the American College of Medical Informatics. DBMI faculty hold additional appointments in various departments, including anesthesiology, biochemistry, biomedical engineering, computer science, hematology and oncology, human genetics, internal medicine, and pediatrics.

DBMI faculty often create and maintain readily accessible, large-scale operational clinical information systems, through which new scientific hypotheses are tested and new technologies are deployed. For example, Vanderbilt’s EHR, StarChart, is an integrated, longitudinal electronic patient charting system that includes comprehensive EHRs with web-accessible intranet retrieval tools. It currently houses more than 120 million documents. StarChart is a rich source of descriptors of disease conditions, associated signs and symptoms, and diagnostic and therapeutic interventions, and is an integrated application where clinicians can access electronic information from one screen. StarChart functionality has also been leveraged to launch fully integrated clinical decision support tools that support electronic, evidence-based ordering of tests and therapies, including prescriptions, in both the in and outpatient settings. As an extension of these decision-support capabilities at the point of care, Vanderbilt has been the first center to include genetic information in EHR-driven clinical decision support through the computerized provider order-entry system and electronic prescribing application in order to guide providers to dose selected medications according to a genome-informed model. These advances have catapulted Vanderbilt into a state-of-the-art laboratory for innovations that support population health, as recognized by groups such as PCORI, CMS, and the NIH in recent funding to members of our DBMI and School of Medicine faculty.