Fern FitzHenry, Ph.D., R.N., Dr. FitzHenry is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics.

Background and Prior Work: Dr. FitzHenry has a graduate degree in business from Northwestern University in addition to her BSN and PhD from the College of Nursing at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She began her career in the field of biomedical informatics in 1983. Since joining Vanderbilt University Medical Center in 1997, she played a central role in building the business case and requirements definition for multiple applications including outpatient charges, outpatient orders, utilization management, electronic prescribing, embedding SNOMED coding into structured notes, electronic alerts, and surrogates/delegates for the patient portal.

She is also a Fellow in the American College of Health Care Executives and a retired Colonel from the United States Air Force Reserve.

Interests: Dr. FitzHenry's research interests are in improving the management of pain, the identification of medication errors and adverse events, concept identification in electronic medical records, complementary and alternative healthcare, the impact on processes of system adoption, natural language processing, and return on investment/business case analysis.