William W. Stead,
M.D.
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 is a unique structure
combining the operational units responsible for the Medical
Center's information management
infrastructure, the Eskind Biomedical Library, and the academic Department of
Biomedical Informatics. Dr. Stead is
also Assistant to the Chancellor for Informatics and
Chief Information Architect for Vanderbilt
University. In this capacity he is charged with leading
development of University strategies to take advantage of advances in
information technology and knowledge management. In addition, Dr. Stead is Chairman of the Vanderbilt
Center for Better Health -
established in June 2002 to help lead transformational change in health care
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 novel techniques for linking information into diagnostic and
treatment processes, in overcoming the cultural barriers to changing practice
to take advantage of the techniques, and in reducing the cost and time required
to implement the requisite 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 currently serves on the Board of Regents
of the National Library of Medicine and 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 addition to his academic responsibilities, Dr Stead is a Director of
HealthStream, Director of NetSilica, and Chief Technology Officer of
EBMsolutions