Zoom On - Patricia Flatley Brennan, RN, PhD

A background in nursing and engineering bring a unique perspective to the subject of our Zoom On.  Patricia Flatley Brennan is Lillian L. Moehlman Bascom Professor, School of Nursing and College of Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison and National Program Director, Project HealthDesign,  a project to explore the power and potential of personal health records. 

Dr. Brennan has a Masters of Science in Nursing from the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD in Industrial Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her previous role include  critical care nursing, psychiatric nursing and academic positions. She developed ComputerLink, an electronic network designed to reduce isolation and improve self-care among home care patients and directed HeartCare, an Internet-based tailored information and communication service that helped home-dwelling cardiac patients recover faster, and with fewer symptoms. 

As National Program Director of Dr Brennan conducts external evaluations of novel HIT architectures, such as SMArt and UNDS, which enable innovative decision support and research-view “apps” to be deployed atop existing electronic health records (EHRs) and data repositories. Brennan leads the Living Environments Laboratory at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, which includes a 6-sided virtual reality CAVE that her group uses to re-create visually every environment on earth, and develop new ways for effective visualisation of high dimensional data. Supported by AHRQ, her group explores the impact of household contexts on personal health information management. 

She is a fellow of both the American Academy of Nursing (1991) and the American College of Medical Informatics (1993). Dr. Brennan was elected to the Institute of Medicine in 2002, and in 2009 became an elected member of the New York Academy of Medicine.