I’m Whende M. Carroll, MSN, RN, NI-BC, FHIMSS, an informatics specialist with over 25 years of experience in nursing and the dynamic universe of health information technology.
As a nurse technologist, Founder of Nurse Evolution, and Clinical Informatics Advisor at HIMSS, my purpose is to help nurses evolve practice and the profession through understanding how to expertly use revolutionary healthcare technologies, advanced data analytics, and innovation to improve health equity, patient safety and quality outcomes, lower costs, and enhance the patient and nurse experience. I am a healthcare technology consultant, award-winning author and editor, and proud member of the global nursing community of thought leaders focusing on spreading the word about the essential value of the interprofessional clinical informatics specialty, practice, education, and leadership.
My informatics story
Throughout my time in direct patient care, my fellow nurses and I experienced many inefficiencies, which directly affected productivity and patient outcomes. A desire to transform practice began early in my nursing career. I realized I wanted to move into a non-clinical professional role to impact health and wellness from a different angle. So, I made a career change to quality improvement to better care delivery and processes for clinicians. When I discovered that I could be a nurse and use technology to impact safety and quality, and improve efficiencies and decrease waste, to satisfy my love of nursing and technology, making a transition into nursing informatics was a logical and exciting choice. It has been so rewarding and satisfying!
My professional career has taken many twists and turns, moving from traditional nursing roles to private sector non-profit, health IT vendors, and startup environments. I learned about coding, data analytics, and intelligent technologies in those settings and how each could dramatically improve nursing care and operations. That work led me to discover a lack of understanding by nurses about informatics, Healthcare IT, data analytics, innovation, and revolutionary technologies—and I saw an opportunity to fill that void.
I founded Nurse Evolution and edited the textbook Emerging Technologies for Nurses–Implications for Practice to help nurses appreciate how data and nurse-led innovations in Healthcare IT can genuinely better manage patient populations, lower healthcare costs, and improve the patient and nurse experience. Today, I encourage nurses to raise the voice and visibility of nursing informatics, promote health equity and develop policy in Healthcare IT and be courageous in their quest to discover their purpose and satisfaction in the industry and the nursing profession.
Check out my award-winning book!
This textbook, written by nurses for nurses, introduces all nurses in every practice setting to emerging data-driven advances in the technology industry, just beginning to be used in healthcare delivery and operations today and will shape the future of nursing practice. The book provides nurses with essential information about how data, technological advances, and innovation synergize to add value to healthcare, particularly in nursing practice. It guides nurses’ learning about new technologies, including Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Realities, the Internet of Things, Precision Health, and Genomics. The textbook provides vital evidence about emerging technologies not yet available in the nursing literature and has received the American Journal of Nursing (AJN) 2020 Book of the Year Award in the Informatics category.
