Bonnie L. Westra, PhD, RN, FAAN, FACMI

Dr. Westra is an Associate Professor in the School of Nursing and Director for the Center for Nursing Informatics. Prior to coming to the University, she was an owner in a software company that created an electronic health record integrated with scheduling, and billing and incorporated standardized data. Her informatics research includes terminology development, application, and evaluation; knowledge discovery in databases; predictive analytics for outcomes; and evaluating and deriving new evidence based guidelines from electronic health record (EHR) data. She leads an interprofessional team to develop information models from flowsheets to extend common data models for comparative effectiveness research. She co-chaired the Informatics Committee for the University of Minnesota’s CTSA grant, responsible for development of a clinical data warehouse and tools for researchers to access EHR data. She led the videotaping of the nursing informatics pioneers as part of AMIA’s Nursing Informatics History Committee. She co-leads a national initiative (Nursing Knowledge: Big Data Science)for comparable and sharable nurse-sensitive data to extend big data for data science (http://z.umn.edu/bigdata). The work includes 10 national virtual working groups with annual meetings to report progress.