Steven Brown, M.D., M.S., is Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Director of the Compensation Pension Examination Program (CPEP) at the Nashville VAMC.

Background: Dr. Brown initially came to Vanderbilt from Emory University (where he was an Assistant Professor of Medicine) in the mid-1990s, through an NLM-sponsored Medical Informatics Apprenticeship training grant. He obtained a Masters Degree in Biomedical Engineering as part of his training at VUMC.

Prior Work: Dr. Brown is both a knowledgeable general internist and a talented medical informatician. He had over a decade of experience in using the THERESA hospital information system developed at Grady Memorial Hospital, and this experience has been valuable in his position at Nashville VAMC. Dr. Brown's research during his Masters Degree thesis project was to analyze a list of over 900,000 problem statements entered into the THERESA System at Grady Memorial (over the past decade). From this list, using a variety of lexical processing techniques combined with his own knowledge of medicine, Dr. Brown has distilled a list of approximately 17,000 unique basic problem statements, and has mapped them to the standard National Library of Medicine Unified Medical Language System Metathesaurus. In 1999, he published the results of his problem list vocabulary research in the Annals of Internal Medicine. Dr. Brown recently assumed national prominence as the director of electronic clinical vocabulary development for the entire VA System coast to coast.