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