Hilary Tindle, M.D., MPH

Dr. Hilary Tindle is a physician-scientist, associate professor of medicine, and William Anderson Spickard, Jr., M.D. Chair in Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. A nationally-recognized expert in smoking and tobacco cessation, Dr. Tindle joined Vanderbilt in 2014 to found and direct ViTAL, the Vanderbilt Center for Tobacco, Addiction and Lifestyle. The ViTAL Center serves clinical, educational, and research missions across VUMC.

Dr. Tindle is the principal investigator (PI) or multiple PI of four NIH-sponsored randomized controlled trials for smoking cessation. These studies also track the use of electronic cigarettes to understand effects on cessation among medically and psychiatrically-vulnerable smokers.

Clinically, Dr. Tindle directs an inpatient Tobacco Treatment Service (TTS) based on the Ottawa and Massachusetts General Hospital models. The TTS leverages the electronic health record (EHR) to implement comparative effectiveness trials and deliver evidence-based clinical care at the bedside and beyond by linking academic health centers to community programs, including state quitlines and Smokefree.gov.

Dr. Tindle has spearheaded tobacco quality improvement, including improving EHR capture and treatment of tobacco and electronic cigarette use, throughout all Vanderbilt hospitals and clinics, and continues to consult for the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center where she founded a similar tobacco control program in 2011 while on the faculty there.

She is on the Advisory Board of the North American Quitline Consortium to facilitate eReferrals between healthcare systems and state quitlines and serves as a standing member of the NIH Study Section Interventions to Prevent and Treat Addictions. Since 2015 she has contributed to the NCCN Smoking Cessation Guidelines for cancer patients, and in 2014 was a contributing author to the 50th Anniversary Surgeon General's Report, The Health Consequences of Smoking—50 Years of Progress.