Dr. Jacobson serves as a senior advisor to ICA and recently retired as the Vice Chancellor for Health Affairs at Vanderbilt University. In that role, he functioned as the Chief Executive Officer of Vanderbilt Medical Center.
As a senior medical administrator, Dr. Jacobson’s interests are focused on health care improvement through the optimal application of information and information technology. Reducing practice variability to improve quality, reduce errors, and control unnecessary costs are priority goals at the Vanderbilt Medical Center.
Dr. Jacobson is the chairman of the board of directors of the Nashville Health Care Council, the Middle Tennessee Council of the Boy Scouts of America; and he serves on the boards for HealthGate Data Corp., Kinetic Concepts, Inc. (KCI), and Ingram Industries. Dr. Jacobson has published over 100 research articles, reviews, and book chapters and co-edited the book, The Principles and Practice of Nephrology.
Dr. Jacobson is also a member of numerous professional organizations including the American Society of Clinical Investigation, the Association of American Physicians, the Society of Medical Administrators, and the prestigious Institute of Medicine.
After earning an M.D. degree from the University of Illinois in 1972, Dr. Jacobson completed an internal medicine residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital, and specialty training in nephrology at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Dallas. Dr. Jacobson is Board certified in both Internal Medicine and Nephrology. He joined the Vanderbilt Medical School faculty in 1985 as Professor of Medicine and Director of the Division of Nephrology and in 1997, became Vice Chancellor for Health Affairs.
Prior to that, in 1978, after two years of active duty in the U. S. Army as Chief of Nephrology at the U.S. Army Surgical Research Center at Brooke Army Medical Center, he joined the faculty at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, Texas.