Adam Wright, PhD, FACMI, FAMIA, FIAHSI

About Me

I'm Adam Wright, a professor of Biomedical Informatics and Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and I direct the Vanderbilt Clinical Informatics Center (VCLIC). Most of my work comes down to building and testing software that helps clinicians make better decisions and catch mistakes before they reach patients.

I studied Mathematical and Computational Sciences at Stanford and did my PhD in Medical Informatics at Oregon Health & Science University. Before Vanderbilt, I spent more than a decade on the faculty at Harvard Medical School, working on clinical decision support and innovation at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Mass General Brigham.

A lot of what I do now looks at how AI, and lately large language models, can be used safely and transparently at the bedside. I've run NIH and AHRQ funded studies on decision support safety, alert fatigue, adverse event detection, and sharing decision support content across health systems. I also teach, mentor, serve on a few editorial boards, and stay active in AMIA.

Outside of work I'm usually with my family in Nashville, TN, or chasing the next research question somewhere between technology, AI, and patient care.

VCLIC

VCLIC is where a lot of our research actually gets built and tested. It brings faculty, students, and clinicians together to work on some of the harder problems in healthcare: clinical decision support, predictive algorithms, and figuring out which alerts are worth a clinician's attention and which just add noise. Everything we build has to hold up inside real clinical workflows.

We run the VCLIC Seminar Series, mentor residents and fellows, and work closely with clinical and operational leaders across Vanderbilt. We also support Vanderbilt's EHR innovation work.

Safety and usability drive most of what we do. Recent projects include explainable AI for decision support alerts, large-scale monitoring of alert fatigue, and making LLM-based tools easier to trust.

Research

Explainable AI in healthcare
Clinical decision support reliability and safety
Machine learning for adverse event detection
Human-centered design for alert systems
Patient safety and healthcare quality

Teaching & Mentoring

I teach courses in clinical decision support and health IT, and I've mentored a lot of students, fellows, and junior faculty over the years. Helping the next group of informatics leaders learn to use data and technology in medicine carefully, and ethically, is something I take seriously.

Publications

I've written more than 400 peer-reviewed articles on clinical informatics. My work has appeared in journals including JAMIA, NEJM, and Applied Clinical Informatics.

View Google Scholar Profile

Contact

Email: adam@vumc.org

Location: Nashville, TN