Patricia Sengstack, DNP, RN-BC, CPHIMS

Dr. Sengstack is the Chief Nursing Informatics Officer for the Bon Secours Health System and is the former Deputy CIO and Chief of Clinical Informatics at the National Institutes of Health, Clinical Center in Bethesda, MD. She has her DNP from Vanderbilt University and a Master’s in Nursing Informatics from the University of Maryland. She is currently serving as the President of the American Nursing Informatics Association (until April 2015). She has multiple informatics publications, and most recently has published a Sigma Theta Tau book titled, “Mastering Informatics: A Healthcare Handbook for Success”. She is currently on the faculty at Vanderbilt University and teaches informatics at the masters and doctoral levels. Her focus over the last several years has been health information technology’s impact on patient safety as well as building a program to improve the evaluation process of IT systems. Dr. Sengstack’s doctoral work at Vanderbilt involved research on the configuration of safe CPOE systems and resulted in the publication of a 46 item checklist for organizations to evaluate their systems. This was followed by another health IT publication addressing issues associated with the safety of pick-lists in electronic health records (EHR). Her many other publications can be found on her attached resume.

In her role at Bon Secours she provides both strategic and operational nursing leadership in the development, deployment, optimization and integration of clinical information systems to support clinicians and patient care across an integrated healthcare delivery network. That network includes 19 acute-care hospitals, one psychiatric hospital, five nursing care facilities, four assisted living facilities, and 14 home care and hospice services. In the organization’s transition to a focus on population health and the implementation of an ACO (MSSP), she has provided expertise in multiple informatics areas that include EHR reconfiguration, data extraction and analysis, and innovative methods to utilize technologies to support transitions of care. She has championed the use of technologies, both EHR and HIE based that provide the interoperability to get patient data to the right place at the right time. In the organization’s Business Intelligence journey, Dr. Sengstack has played an integral role in the development of data governance structures to support a learning environment. One of her strengths includes the ability to translate complex analytical concepts so care providers can understand and use the information both retrospectively and in real-time to drive patient care improvements.

Over the last year, Dr. Sengstack has spoken at the American Nurses Association Quality Conference, the American Organization of Nurse Executives annual conference, the Summer Institute in Nursing Informatics and at the HIMSS Annual Symposium on a variety of informatics topics. In her current position as CNIO for the Bon Secours Health System and in her former position as Deputy CIO at the NIH Clinical Center, Dr. Sengstack has led teams through EHR implementations, upgrades, downtimes (both expected and unexpected), and optimization work. Her current evaluative studies include the effectiveness of best practice alerts for the timely removal of indwelling urinary catheters using nurse driven protocols; the ability of a modified early warning system (integrated into the EHR) to reduce the number of codes that occur outside the ICU; determining why nurses are not optimizing smart IV pump technology: and the impact of real time data shared at the point of care via dashboards for multiple clinical parameters. She believes that health IT will continue to transform care delivery and is excited to be part of the journey.