Medicine has changed quickly with the advent of digital technologies that seek to increase healthcare effectiveness and safety. Consequently, the field of nursing informatics has grown, fusing professional knowledge, ICT, and nursing to improve patient outcomes (Reid et al., 2021). A description of nursing informatics helps nurses who are interested in the field clarify their duties and provides guidelines for practice, instruction, training, and research. Furthermore, a definition is an essential part of national scope documents for the nursing informatics specialty. the use of information technology for tasks performed by nurses as part of their duties and being under the purview of nursing. In other words, nursing informatics is the application of information technology by nurses in patient care, healthcare facility administration, or career education (Staggers, 2002). The field of nursing informatics blends nursing science with several information and analytical sciences to find, define, manage, and transfer data, information, knowledge, and wisdom in nursing practice. For many people, the main focus of healthcare informatics in general and nursing informatics specifically is technology. One example is the need that all healthcare facilities to have electronic health records (Association, 2014). As nurse innovators, practicing nurses, nursing administrators, nurse researchers, and nurse educators are needed to design, plan, and coordinate the application of technology and informatics theory in nursing.
Medicine-Nursing Informatics innovator 1- Patricia Abbott, PhD, RN, FAAN, FACMI
Dr. Abbott is an associate professor at the University of Michigan School of Nursing. Before going to the University of Michigan School of Nursing, she was an Associate Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing and Medicine. She finished her two-year post-doctoral NIH-funded research fellowship at the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory (HCIL) at the University of Maryland College Park with success, focusing on the development of practical and error-reducing HIT. By focusing on visualization—the process of making sense of massive amounts of healthcare data in a useful way—human-computer interaction, and user-centered design, Dr. Abbott expanded her research interests at HCI. Her areas of interest in the study are data analytics and knowledge discovery in big datasets (Wieck, 2019).
Medicine – Contributions influenced Health Information Technology
The early efforts of Dr. Abbott have contributed to the establishment of the Nursing Informatics Specialization. She was a member of the ANA’s original author team for the Scope and Standards of NI Practice and later collaborated with the ANCC to develop the first NI certification test. She was the Director of Graduate Programs in Nursing Informatics at the University of Maryland from 1998 to 2003 (Abbott, 2002).
Contributions Affected the Practice of Nursing
Dr. Abbott is dedicated to developing IT for low-resource settings so that nurses and other caregivers in remote locations may learn about health issues. Because of her work with knowledge networks intended for areas with limited bandwidth (WHO), she has collaborated with the World Health Organization, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), and the Rockefeller Foundation (Wieck, 2019). Dr. Abbott moved to the Hopkins School of Nursing in 2004 and started working for front-line healthcare providers in low-resource situations in global health informatics. She has worked in this field for most of her recent career, using low-bandwidth technologies and information management strategies to
