Dr. Vest's area of interest is the organizational determinants and effectiveness of health information technology and systems. Most of his work is focused on the adoption and utilization of health information exchange (HIE) systems. His evaluations of HIE systems and the determinants of their adoption by hospitals appears in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, the International Journal of Medical Informatics, the Journal of Medical Systems and Applied Clinical Informatics. His 25+ peer-reviewed publications have employed a variety of research techniques from large scale database analyses, to survey research, to qualitative focus groups and interviews. Most of his current work makes use of random-effects regression models to account for clustering of observations and statistical techniques to adjust for selection bias in secondary data analyses.

In addition, he has worked on other adoption of other organizational level interventions, such as general transformation strategies and the medical home concept. His publication on healthcare transformation efforts in Implementation Science is among BioMedCentral's Highly Accessed articles and his review of the medical home appeared in special issue of Medical Care Research & Review.

As a former local public health practitioner, Dr. Vest has a particular interest in effective public health information systems. He has peer-reviewed publications that examined the role of information technology governance structures on local public health departments' adoption of IT/IS, the structure of state and local public health information systems, as well as an evaluation of email intervention to improve disease notification efforts.