Wael Alrifai, MD, MS, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and Biomedical Informatics, and Chetan Aher, MD, Assistant Professor of Surgery, are the inaugural winners of the Physician Builder Award, sponsored by the Vanderbilt Clinical Informatics Center (VCLIC). They received trophies made from Lego building blocks and gift certificates.
Pictured above: Adam Wright, PhD, whose Vanderbilt Clinical Informatics Center sponsors the Physician Builder Awards; recipients Wael Alrifai, MD, and Chetan Aher, MD; and Jonathan Wanderer, MD, director of the Physician Builder Program. Photo by Susan Urmy
The eStart Physician Builder Program supports VUMC physicians and other health care team members in devising and implementing new content and tools for VUMC's health information technology system, eStart.
Dr. Alrifai's award is in recognition of his neonatal sequential organ failure assessment (nSOFA) score calculator. The SOFA score provides an index of how sick a patient is.
"For neonates, Wael created a way to have this score computed in eStar and trended at multiple points over the course of the day, so, as a neonatologist, you can see if a baby you're taking care of is getting worse or better - very helpful clinically," said Jonathan Wanderer, MD, Associate Professor of Anesthesiology and Biomedical Informatics and Director of the eStar Physician Builder Program.