William W. Stead, M.D.
Director, Informatics Center
Associate Vice-Chancellor for Health Affairs
Professor, Medicine and Biomedical Informatics
Vanderbilt University Medical Center

William W. Stead, M.D., is Professor of Medicine and Biomedical Informatics, Director of the Informatics Center and Associate Vice Chancellor for Health Affairs at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. The Informatics Center brings together research and education in biomedical informatics with provision of the Medical Center's operation and decision support infrastructure. In addition to serving as the Medical Center's Chief Information Officer, Dr. Stead is Chief Information Architect for Vanderbilt University and Chairman of the Vanderbilt Center for Better Health. The Center for Better Health was established in June 2002 to help accelerate change in healthcare through optimal use of information technology.

Dr. Stead received his B.A. and M.D. from Duke University where he also served residencies 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 cultural barriers to changing practice to take advantage of these techniques, and in reducing the cost and time required to implement enterprise-wide information technology infrastructure. Dr. Stead is a Founding Fellow of both the American College of Medical Informatics and the American Institute for Engineering in Biology and Medicine, and a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies.

He is currently Chairman of the Board of Regents of the National Library of Medicine and serves on the Computer Science and Telecommunication Board of the National Research Council. 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.

In October 2004, Dr. Stead was appointed to the Commission on Systemic Interoperability.

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

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Report Highlights:

Patient and Healthcare Provider Stories

An Interoperable Medication Record for Every American

Existing Efforts Nationwide

Audio Patient and Provider Interviews