B7:    Nursing and informatics in long term care facilities: using knowledge discovery to improve outcomes

Patricia A Abbott PhD RNC is currently the Specialty Coordinator of the Graduate Programs in Nursing Informatics at the University of Maryland School of Nursing. Patricia completed the Nursing Informatics program at UM,B with a MS in 1992. She completed another MS in Information Systems Management from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County in 1996 and finished her PhD in Information Systems Management in 1999.

Dr Abbott is very involved in nursing informatics. She served on the original ANA Standards of Practice Task Force for Nursing Informatics in 1994. She also served for six years (1994-2000) on the ANCC Test Development Committee for the Nursing Informatics Certification exam, holding the office of Chair from 1996-1998 and serving on the ANCC Board on Certification during that time.

Dr Abbott is currently the Chair of the American Medical Informatics Association Nursing Informatics Working Group and serves as the United States Representative to the International Medical Informatics Association SIG on Nursing Informatics. Patricia is currently funded by the National Library of Medicine, where she is implementing and studying the impact of web-based technology utilisation within the Governors’ Wellmobiles (mobile clinics for uninsured women and children). Dr Abbott's primary research focus is in the use of connectionist machine learning techniques, predictive classifiers, neural networks, and knowledge discovery in large datasets (KDD) as related to the analysis of large datasets in long-term care.