Vanderbilt Launches New Clinical Informatics, Data Center
The Vanderbilt Clinical Informatics Center will ensure that faculty, staff, and students can access data, make new discoveries, and evaluate results.
Source: Thinkstock
- Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) has launched the new Vanderbilt Clinical Informatics Center (VCLIC), which will promote and support collaborations in clinical informatics across the institution.
“The primary idea driving clinical informatics is that we should use computerized information systems to help people make better clinical decisions,” said Adam Wright, PhD, who joined Vanderbilt last August as director of clinical decision support and the new Vanderbilt Clinical Informatics Center (VCLIC).
“Systems can be engineered to take all the data we’re collecting on patients and efficiently spot patterns and likely pitfalls. Then we can issue, within the clinical workflow, appropriate alerts, reminders and tailored clinical recommendations.”
VUMC has one of the largest biomedical informatics departments in the country and is recognized as a leader in applying computer and information science to care delivery services.
The launch of VCLIC adds to VUMC’s efforts to advance clinical informatics in healthcare. In November 2017, the institution shut down key decision support systems and adopted commercial software from Epic Systems.
“In leaving behind our prized legacy systems in favor of commercial software, we’ve reaped all sorts of benefits. And what helped to clinch our decision was knowing that we would retain the ability to push clinical decision support in new directions at VUMC, while also perhaps more directly influencing how commercial decision support systems are engineered,” said Kevin Johnson, MD, MS, chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics and informatician-in-chief at VUMC.
“With the recruitment of Adam and the establishment of VCLIC, we’re adding still more support for clinical informatics, ensuring that Vanderbilt continues to lead in this field.”
Out of the box, Epic provides only a basic level of decision support, but Epic gives hospitals tools that can augment this support. VUMC has maintained strong in-house resources for developing, implementing, and governing clinical decision support.
“One main goal of VCLIC is that people throughout Vanderbilt, when they have an idea or innovation that involves clinical informatics, will feel that Vanderbilt is the place to do it, that they’re going to have the resources that they need to do it and they’re going to succeed,” Wright said.
“People here have a lot more control than they may realize over how Epic works in our hospitals and clinics. If there’s something we don’t like about how Epic is working, in most cases there’s a step that we could take to change the way it works, to align more with what we wanted to do.”
VCLIC will aim to pave the way for clinical informatics initiatives, educating researchers and staff about how to build and evaluate interventions, how to access data, and how to disseminate results within and beyond VUMC. The center will also help researchers design, plan, and execute clinical informatics research, and identify new topics of interest for research initiatives.
“With Epic we’ve achieved one dream, which was the adoption dream, and now we want to achieve the next phase, which I’d say is the effective use dream. Epic systems give us a platform to do things we could never do before in terms of decision support and learning from the data,” Wright said.
With VCLIC, VUMC researchers will also work to provide informatics expertise to operational Health IT initiatives at VUMC, and coordinate evaluations and research collaborations between Health IT and VCLIC researchers. This will lead to optimal partnerships and foster innovative discoveries across the institution.
“One of the things we need to do is identify the subset of decision support we have right now that is unhelpful, or distracting, and turn it off or retarget it or improve it so that people are less annoyed by the large volume of alerts they may be getting,” he said.