Kelly Aldrich, DNP, MS, RN-BC, FHIMSS

Dr. Aldrich is a board-certified Informatics Nurse Specialist and has served over 35 years in healthcare clinical, leadership, academic and informatics roles. She is currently the Director of Innovation and Associate Professor for Vanderbilt University School of Nursing with a secondary appointment in the Department of Biomedical Informatics. Dr. Aldrich also serves as the Senior Nurse Executive for the Center for Medical Interoperability, a non-profit organization led by health systems to simplify and advance data sharing among medical technologies and systems. Her work focuses on ensuring that technical solutions are designed and equipped to address the goals of caregivers and patients by informing and assessing the efficacy of technical interoperability specifications and their impact on patient safety, health care processes and outcomes, care coordination, informed decision making, and caregiver burden.

Dr. Aldrich spent the first twenty years of her career at the bedside in cardiac and critical care settings. Driven by a passion and dedication to create a seamless patient-centered care environment supported by functional technology, she pursued further academic training in informatics and executive leadership. As the inaugural CNIO for HCA, Dr. Aldrich created a systems integration approach with strategic and tactical roadmaps for implementing nursing informatics solutions at scale. Her innovation developed many transformative solutions across the systems 170 hospitals, including: iMobile for secure mobile communications and integration between care teams and the patient, VitalsNow for medical device interoperability and automated clinical decision support for clinical deterioration and implemented an evidence- based informatics EHR nursing documentation standardization model.

She is engaged in research and innovation learning models with her most recent publication advocating for the unique nurse identifier and Digital RN Citizen model. Other publications include Informatics for Nursing documentation standards, Interoperability and The Blending Education Leadership and Technology (BELT) model for highly reliable technology innovation.

Recognized as an expert transformative leader in healthcare informatics, Dr. Aldrich serves on numerous policy and industry advisory councils at the national level. She has served on HHS/ONC task forces focused on Interoperability Experience, Standards, Cybersecurity and the National Nursing Informatics Executive Committee at HIMSS.

She received her Master of Science in Healthcare Systems Leadership and Nursing Informatics and Doctor of Nursing from the University of South Florida.