My Philosophy and Goals

Personal Philosophy

The definition of nursing informatics has changed over time.  The one I like best is the one that says informatics is the integration of computer science, which is hardware and software, and information science, which is the data, information, knowledge, wisdom (DIKW) pyramid, and nursing science, which is nursing practice.

            -Virginia Saba

Dr. Saba is a pioneer in Health Information Technology (HIT) and Nursing Informatics (NI) over the last 40 years.  She was one of the very first NI nurses and like most of us in informatics she landed here by accident.  She began her career working as a home health/public community health.  In the late 1960's, she was working at the National Institute of Perinatal Research and was conducting researching  on pregnancy statistics.  Dr. Saba's job was to code the delivery statics they were collecting.  She got into an argument with the statistician about dilatation numbers.  The statistician said when women went into labor they went from 1 to 99 centimeters.  She informed him he was wrong because the highest number could only be a 10.  He argued that the statistics show it's 1-99 and that she did not understand how computer processing works.  That really irritated her, so started taking courses offered by IBM and later went on to earn a Computer Science degree in the early 80's.  Out of her work in developing and coding, she eventually developed the Home Health Care Classification of nursing diagnosis and interventions which became known as the Clinical Care Classification system used today in many hospitals across the country as standard vocabulary for nursing documentation.  Dr. Saba continued to push the limits where others wondered why a nurse was even involved.  I had the opportunity to meet Dr. Saba a few years back when I was creating a standard documentation language and she encouraged to keep pushing the limits, make them ask why a nurse, and then show them why.

Professional Goals