Marion J Ball

Senior Advisor, Healthcare and Life Sciences Institute, IBM Research: Professor Emerita, Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing: Faculty Member, Division of Health Sciences Informatics, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine

I was most fortunate to get in to this field at a very early phase of its existence. I was involved in clinical lab systems implementations in the mid 60’s and later as well worked with Hospital information systems selections and implementation.

As an IT person in those early days, I sat in on the required meetings for the nursing and clinical needs and was always the only female…. and for that reason, was assumed to be a nurse. All requests for nursing came to me and I was the representative to the clinical arena.

It seemed to me that a “real nurse” should be sitting at this table BUT NONE WERE INTERESTED BECAUSE THEY FELT UNCOMFORTABLE WITH IT ISSUES AND THE INTERACTIONS WITH ADMINISTRATION.

This was very troubling to me so with the support of my good friend Kathryn Hannah, who is a leader in the field of Nursing and had and has a dedicated interest in informatics in her country, we decided we need to address the education needs for nursing in this arena of… using computers in Nursing.

This we knew was crucial to bring about the transformation in nursing towards understanding IT needs and be sure Nursing professionals be comfortable with their rightful place at the table.

Dr. Hannah and I wrote our first book Using Computers in Nursing in 1983 followed by many more In the Springer Health Informatics series.

We are delighted to see after all these years that Nursing Informatics is a recognized area of study and we have nurses in the field that can hold their own at “the table”.

We still have a long way to go but this is how I got into the field of nursing informatics.

It has been a most gratifying journey.

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