William W. Stead, Chair, is associate vice chancellor for strategy/transformation and director of the Informatics Center at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He serves as chief information officer of the Medical Center and chief information architect for the university. The Informatics Center is a unique blend of the units that manage the medical center’s information technology infrastructure, the Department of Biomedical Informatics of the School of Medicine (research and education), the Eskind Biomedical Library (knowledge management), and the Center for Better Health (accelerating change). Dr. Stead received his B.A. and M.D. from Duke University, where he also completed specialty and subspecialty training in internal medicine and nephrology. As an undergraduate in the 1960s, he was a member of the team that developed the Cardiology Databank, one of the first clinical epidemiology projects to change practice by linking outcomes to process. As a faculty member in nephrology, he was the physician in the physician-engineer partnership that developed The Medical Record (TMR), one of the first practical electronic medical record systems. He helped Duke build one of the first patient-centered hospital information systems (IBM’s PCS/ADS). He led (as principal investigator) two prominent academic health centers, Duke in the 1980s and Vanderbilt in the 1990s, through both planning and implementation phases of large-scale, Integrated Advanced Information Management System (IAIMS) projects. At Vanderbilt, his team has been successful in creating informatics techniques for linking information into