Nursing Informatics Pioneers
According to the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), nursing informatics has been classified as the "science and practice (that) integrates nursing, its information and knowledge, with management of information and communication technologies to promote the health of people, families, and communities worldwide" (2013), and this emerging field has the potential to dramatically improve the delivery of healthcare services across the board. Just as the intrepid Florence Nightingale paved the way for modern nursing as we know it today by establishing the first nursing school at St. Thomas' Hospital in 1860, defining nursing in her famous notes on the profession as "the act of utilizing the environment of the patient to assist him to recovery" (Nightingale, 1860), the widespread adoption and integration of nursing informatics was made possible by the tireless contributions of several influential pioneers. As part of their continued efforts to document the history of nursing informatics, the AMIA has instituted the Nursing Informatics History Project, with 33 recognized leaders in the field submitting to extensive video-recorded and audio-transcribed interviews to provide their personal stories, glimpses into the early days of nursing informatics theory, and a review of the progress made while attempting to implement the practice within American hospitals and healthcare centers. After viewing a number of these interviews, the careers of Dr. Patricia Abbott and Dr. Betty L. Chang stood out as exemplary, and by comparing how the contributions of both women influenced the efficiency and effectiveness of health information technology and nursing practice today, it is...
Patricia Abbott PhD, RN, FAAN, FACMI currently serves as the Co-Director of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO)/World Health Organization (WHO)'s Collaborating Center for Nursing, Information Knowledge and Management at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, and she has been involved in the field of nursing informatics since its beginning in the 1980's. After listening to her interview with the AMIA Nursing Informatics History Project, it became apparent that Dr. Abbott's commitment to the implementation of nursing informatics was not simply a pragmatic career path, because her passion for the subject was made evident as she told of her personal struggles to improve the quality of care administered to long-term patients. Dr. Abbott reveals that her initial inspiration to pursue nursing informatics came while working at the Baltimore VA's Geriatric Research and Education Clinical Center (GRECC), as she compared the care provided to elderly and infirm patients to the steady stewardship offered by her own grandparents, who raised Dr. Abbott as a child. After coming to a stark realization that "there were real issues with the quality of care that we were providing to our older generation," Dr. Abbott dedicated herself to utilizing her base of knowledge in nursing informatics to improve healthcare delivery on a systemic level, and in her words, "unless we are able to start counting and quantifying what happens to patients in the entire health care continuum, I really believe that we can't make things better" (AMIA, 2008).
After leaving GRECC to pursue her…
