Holding on to roots, while shaping the future

Health informatics professor Jay Dorris has deep family roots at Lipscomb. They help him steer students toward a bright future, he says.

Jay Dorris (LA ’07, Pharm.D. ’14), assistant professor of pharmacy practice, came back to his Lipscomb roots just in time to move Lipscomb’s student-pharmacists into the future.

Having worked with custom-built technology at Vanderbilt University, the electronic health record system Epic at University of Florida Health Jacksonville and artificial intelligence at UF’s Shands Gainesville Hospital, Dorris arrived at Lipscomb in 2023 with a wealth of cutting-edge knowledge just as generative AI Chat GPT came into the public’s awareness.

“That made it a really great time to start to put all these pieces together to bring into the classroom and provide some really dynamic and contemporary learning experiences that are really rooted in real life for students,” said Dorris, who works with both pharmacy and health care informatics (HCI) students in the College of Pharmacy.

His excitement at sharing real-world experiences in Lipscomb’s classrooms is rooted in more than his impressive career experience—he is among the third generation of his family to attend and work at Lipscomb, sprouting from his grandfather, Tom Hanvey (A ’42), Lipscomb’s long-time gymnastics coach and faculty member.

With memories of playing on old gymnastics equipment in his grandfather’s back yard (located just down the road from campus), portraying Elvis in the fourth-grade play, playing football for Lipscomb Academy’s legendary Coach Mac (the late Glenn McCadams) and studying pharmacy in only the third cohort launched by Lipscomb College of Pharmacy, Dorris has a lot invested in serving today’s students at the organization that means so much to him and his family.

“One of the things I like to tell people is that Lipscomb brings out talent, skills and abilities that often you had no idea they were there when you when you started with us,” said Dorris. “I feel like we've been able to do that a lot in informatics spaces, and it's led to a lot of practitioners being able to really blaze new trails and thrive in some unique environments.

“Having such deep Lipscomb roots here, I can see how this is just a continuation of what Lipscomb has been doing for a very, very long time.”

Dorris is a good model of that concept.

Having worked for Lipscomb alumnus Trey Hartman (LA ’82, BS ’86) at Deal Drugs as a teen-ager, he knew he wanted to go into pharmacy, but it was during his first year of postdoctoral residency at Perkins Drugs in Gallatin when he started to think about how technology could be used in meaningful ways to help providers and patients.

He graduated from Lipscomb when its Master’s of Health Care Informatics was just beginning, but the faculty and framework were already in the works through a pharmacy informatics residency program, so Lipscomb’s Beth Breeden, now-professor and chair of HCI, selected  him for a second year post-doctoral residency, this time in informatics, in a shared program with Vanderbilt University Medical Center, which at that time had already custom-built numerous electronic systems for its operations, said Dorris.

From there he became a clinical informatics pharmacist, with UF Health, which hosts numerous sites across the state of Florida. He became certified in Epic electronic health record platform, earned various credentials in pharmacy, oncology and analytics modules and later began building elements of a pharmacogenetics AI platform.

“I had so much on-the-job, hands-on learning through Vanderbilt, that I was able to really create a great little niche for myself in applied data analytics in a field called clinical decision support, meaning a lot of the alerts that would tell providers what to do or what not to do,” he said.

At the same time, he was earning clinical experience at a very busy, level one trauma center in Jacksonville, and later in Gainesville he served as a preceptor for UF College of Pharmacy students and was part of building a postdoctoral fellowship in pharmacy informatics.

As part of a multi-hospital health system, Dorris had the opportunity to work on system-level projects. As UF was already thinking ahead about the incorporation of AI, he worked on natural language processing platforms to screen for potential safety events and quality assurance challenges. 

With experience in informatics, clinical pharmacy, teaching and AI, Dorris had the perfect slate of experience to bring cutting edge education to Lipscomb’s student-pharmacists today.

“I do a lot of applied case studies and many of the topics are things that I lived through, like helping during a respiratory pandemic,” said Dorris, who was a responsible for building, deploying and maintaining the electronic health record behind the monoclonal antibody infusions that became popular treatment for Covid-19 in late 2020.

He worked on various UF teams during the pandemic to figure out operational responses such as the electronic and digital systems needs to deploy treatments in unconventional environments, what different electronic needs were there for inpatient vs. outpatient facilities and how facilities could partner in care, among many other challenges.

“It’s fun to bring this sort of real life experiences to the classroom and to connect students with colleagues and people who really lived it,” said Dorris. “I enjoy creating dynamic case-based simulations, especially when we can have experts in the room who lived with something similar to give their expert feedback, providing a really robust experience that students will remember for a long time.”

Dorris sees his work as the same kind of coaching his grandfather did for the highly successful, and popular gymnastics team. Sixteen of Hanvey’s teams competed in the NAIA (National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics) national championships, and his 1979 rings team won the national title. 

Dorris grew up hearing story after story of how his grandfather “loved and cared for his athletes, as competitors but also as people,” said Dorris. “I think about that as how we work with our informatics students, especially as we dive deeper into really unique research and development experiences where we really try to customize.”

“Having that sort of coaching like mentality is something that I've tried to bring into my academic life as we mentor students, and as we think about the future of higher education and provide these really transformative experiences to our Learners.”

Tom and Vivian Hanvey’s (BS ’54) family is full of Lipscomb alumni. Dorris’ mother, Sharon Hanvey Dorris (LA ’83, BS ’87), has worked at Lipscomb Academy’s elementary school. His aunt Kathy Hanvey Rose (LA ’74, BS ’78), married one of Coach Hanvey’s athletes, Ted Rose (BA ’69). His aunt Lisa Hanvey Stinson (LA ’73, BS ’76), married to Phil Stinson (BS ’77); aunt Debbie Hanvey Lambert (LA ’78, BS ’82), married to Darrell Lambert (LA ’75, BA ’79); and uncle Tommy Hanvey (LA ’86, BA ’90), were also all Lipscomb Bisons.

Like Dorris, many of the Hanvey grandchildren also chose Lipscomb for their college education.

Today, Dorris has become a member of Lipscomb’s AI Steering Committee, working to bring his professional AI experience back to the organization that helped raise him. 

“I think the post-AI university looks a lot like the same thing I've experienced at Lipscomb,” said Dorris. “It brings these talents, skills and abilities out that you may have had no idea were there. We’ll be seeing new tools and new challenges for certain, but I’m excited about that future.”