William W. Stead, M.D.

Associate Vice Chancellor for Strategy/Transformation
& Chief Information Officer
Vanderbilt University Medical Center


Dr. Stead is Associate Vice Chancellor for Strategy/Transformation and Director of the Informatics Center at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He serves as Chief Information Officer of the Medical Center and Chief Information Architect for the University. The Informatics Center is a unique blend of the units that manage the medical center's information technology infrastructure, the Department of Biomedical Informatics of the School of Medicine (research and education), the Eskind Biomedical Library (knowledge management), and the Center for Better Health (accelerating change).

Dr. Stead received his B.A. and M.D. from Duke University where he also completed specialty and subspecialty training Internal Medicine and Nephrology. As an undergraduate in the 1960s, he was a member of the team that developed the Cardiology Databank, one of the first clinical epidemiology projects to change practice by linking outcomes to process. As a faculty member in Nephrology, he was the physician in the physician-engineer partnership that developed The Medical Record (TMR), one of the first practical electronic medical record systems. He helped Duke build one of the first patient-centered hospital information systems (IBM's PCS/ASDS). He came to Vanderbilt in 1991 to work out how to link information into workflow to help people make better decisions at an enterprise scale. His team has shown how to translate techniques from the science of biomedical informatics into novel approaches to information infrastructure that reduce cost to implement and barriers to adoption. The resulting enterprise-wide electronic patient chart and communication/decision support tools support his current focus on system-supported, evidence-based practice and research leading tward personalized medicine.

Dr. Stead is McKesson Foundation Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Professor of Medicine. He is a Founding Fellow of both the American College of Medical Informatics and the American Institute for Engineering in Biology and Medicine, and an elected member of both the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies and the American Clinical and Climatological Association. He was the first recipient of the Lindberg Award for Innovation in Informatics and is the 2007 recipient of the Collen Award for Excellence in Medical Informatics. He was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, and served as President of the American Association for Medical Systems and Informatics and the American College of Medical Informatics. He served as Chairman of the Board of Regents of the National Library of Medicine, and as a Presidential appointee to the Commission on Systemic Interoperability. He serves on the Computer Science and Telecommunication Board of the National Research Council and is Chair of their Committee on Engaging the Computer Science Research Community in Health Care Informatics. He is a member of the Tennessee eHealth Advisory Council.

In addition to his academic and advisory responsibilities, Dr. Stead is a Director of HealthStream.



Experience | Boards/Committees | Grants | Publications | Presentations


For more information contact William.W.Stead@Vanderbilt.edu