Steven Brown, MD

Steven Brown received his bachelorís and MD degrees from Brown University. After internship and residency in internal medicine at Emory University, he joined the faculty at Emory and became involved in the creation of Emoryís Computerized Record system named THERESA. His interest in informatics led him to an NLM-sponsored medical informatics fellow at Vanderbilt, and he received his masterís degree in biomedical engineering in the years before biomedical informatics became an academic department. He is currently an Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt. Steve has a long-standing relationship with the Veterans Administration (VA), having served as the Chief Information Officer of the Tennessee Valley VA, while becoming increasingly involved at the national level with data standards relevant to VA clinical systems. This includes serving as the VA representative to the federal Government Computerized Patient Record Framework project (GCPR) and being the national project leader for the VAís efforts to create standard drug reference terminologies. He was team leader for the RADARx project that developed automated methods for adverse drug event discovery, which received a VA national safety award. He also directs the national VA Compensation and Pension ExamProgram (CPEP). CPEPis program dedicated to improving the quality of veteranís disability examinations via applied informatics and traditional quality improvement techniques. This program performs 500,000 examinations and distributes over $30 billion per year based on the results. Dr. Brownís sustained contributions have advanced a systems approach to health care within the VA that has had a favorable impact on the care of literally millions of VA beneficiaries, and his ongoing work is advancing the cause of interoperability for a true National Health Information Infrastructure. The scope and effect of his work are recognized by his election to the College.