Unique
among academic health centers, Vanderbilt University Medical
Center entrusts its Informatics Center with the responsibility for:
(a) providing the essential information infrastructure for patient
care, management, research and education — including the support
for informatics-related research and education in clinical informatics
and the emerging field of bioinformatics (including new initiatives
in genomics and proteomics); and, (b) fusing scholarly research in
biomedical informatics with the dissemination of the resultant knowledge
to individuals through its education programs and into operation through
the infrastructure.
Since the mid 1990’s Vanderbilt University
Medical Center has recruited some of the most outstanding informatics
professionals in the world today. These professionals focus their
efforts on both clinical and biomedical informatics integration
and collaboration. This integration is achieved at the operational
level—knowledge is applied to real world problems on a day-to-day
basis, at the services level—services reflect informatics
knowledge, the research level—developing new and different
ways to support research, and the administrative level.
This synergy from this group creates an unparalleled
laboratory for informatics research, fostering multidisciplinary
rapid prototyping and deployment of applied systems, and evaluation
of their impact. Researchers have access to real-world problems
and operational monies. Faculty members are encouraged to meld service
responsibilities with research activities in a manner that leverages
the clinical and research facilities of the university as an applied
informatics laboratory. This process also serves as a mechanism
to align research interests with the strategic initiatives of the
medical center. The medical center benefits from a technology infrastructure
and architecture that takes full advantage of the new science of
biomedical informatics to achieve a scale of productivity not possible
with traditional information systems.
The Informatics Center has generated many
very successful and nationally/internationally recognized products.
The following are just a few; please check our further web pages
for more details.
StarChart, our electronic medical record, is an up-to-date, comprehensive,
electronic medical record with web-accessible Intranet retrieval
tools and it currently has more than 31 million documents.
WizOrder, a relational database of all orders entered on all inpatients
at Vanderbilt since January 1998 exists.
StarPanel is an integrated application where clinicians can access
electronic information from one screen.
Pathworx is a care management/documentation system that electronically
links clinical care pathways to the patient flow sheet.