William W. Stead, M.D.

Associate Vice Chancellor for Health Affairs
& Chief Information Officer
Vanderbilt University Medical Center


Dr. Stead is Associate Vice Chancellor for Health Affairs and Director of the Informatics Center at Vanderbilt University. In this role, he functions as Chief Information Officer of the Vanderbilt 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 in 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 computer-based patient record systems. He helped Duke build one of the first patient-centered hospital information systems. He has led (as PI) two prominent academic health centers, Duke in the 1980s, and Vanderbilt in the 1990s, through both planning and implementation phases of large-scale, Integrated Advanced Information Management System (IAIMS) projects. At Vanderbilt, his team has been successful in creating informatics techniques for linking information into clinical workflow, in overcoming the barriers to technology adoption, and in reducing the cost and time required to implement enterprise-wide information technology infrastructure.

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 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 serves on the Computer Science and Telecommunication Board of the National Research Council. 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.

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




Experience | Boards/Committees | Grants | Publications | Presentations


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