Patricia Abbott, PhD

Dr. Patricia Abbott trained in nursing at the University of Maryland and, after practicing for a few years, developed a growing interest in informatics. She obtained her master's degree in nursing informatics in 1992 and went on to earn a PhD in information systems in 1999. Even before completing her PhD, she had become a well-known and contributing member of the informatics community while serving as a clinical specialist for information systems at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. She subsequently joined the faculty of nursing, first at Maryland and, since 2003, at Johns Hopkins University, where she is Director of the World Health Organization (WHO)/Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) Center for Information Systems in Nursing Care. Dr. Abbott has been among the first nurses to apply data-mining techniques to the field of nursing, exploring existing databases in long-term care to understand better the factors that contribute to patient outcomes. She has extended her preliminary work into the patient safety arena, ensuring strong informatics content in programs funded by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) and Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). Dr. Abbott is recognized internationally for her leadership in preparing scholars and practitioners in nursing informatics. She has also led the development of the American Nurses Association (ANA) Standards of Practice for Nursing Informatics. She has worked tirelessly as a member of the leadership team, Nursing Informatics Working Group, as our country's representative to the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) Nursing Special Interest Group, and as a member of the Editorial Board of JAMIA. She also serves on the AMIA Board of Directors. Dr. Abbott possesses a unique talent for articulating effectively the disciplinary contributions to a multidisciplinary organization. Patricia Abbott brings to the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI) a gifted, hard-working academic whose abilities are commensurate with the depth of knowledge she possesses in emerging dimensions of our field.