Vanderbilt University Medical Center · Biomedical Informatics

Optimization of Health ProcEsses and Networks Laboratory

OHPEN Lab

We build human-centered, agentic AI for healthcare delivery — and graph AI for drug safety and therapeutic discovery.

Who we are

AI in service of patients

Directed by You Chen, PhD, FAMIA, we turn large-scale, multimodal health data — EHRs, clinical notes, audit logs, genomics, and wearables — into AI systems that are deployed against real clinical problems. Our active projects predict next-day hospital discharge, close gaps in continuous obesity care, accelerate early Alzheimer's treatment with EHR-integrated AI agents, and uncover dangerous drug-drug and drug-gene interactions.

Two pillars

What drives the lab

Abstract clinical pathway network illustration

Human-centered & agentic AI for healthcare delivery

Clinical pathways, care-team networks, and patient trajectories — learned from the digital footprints of care and returned to clinicians as decision support.

Abstract drug-gene knowledge graph illustration

Graph AI & foundation models for drug safety and discovery

Knowledge graphs and graph neural networks that predict adverse drug interactions and surface new therapeutic candidates from biobank-scale data.

How we work

From data to impact

Workflow: multimodal health data feeds AI models and agents, producing better care delivery and safer therapeutics

Recognition

Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers

The highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding early-career scientists and engineers, awarded to lab director You Chen in 2024. Read the story →

🎖️ Fellow of AMIA, 2021 📄 100+ publications · 4,200+ citations 💰 $8.2M active funding as PI/MPI 🏆 DBMI Outstanding Researcher, 2022

Product

CareContinuum — our iOS app

CareContinuum app icon

Obesity and weight-management care in one place — tracking, organization, and AI-supported insights, born from our human-AI obesity-care research.

Teaching

Network Analysis and Graph AI in Healthcare

Every fall at Vanderbilt (BMIF 7391 / CS 5891 / CS 3891) — from the foundations of network analysis to graph neural networks, Graph RAG, and biomedical foundation models.

Syllabus (Fall 2026) · More about the course