UI3 Cluster Faculty Member and Assistant Professor Omar Chowdhury Wins DARPA Award

IowaNow article by Richard C. Lewis, September 17, 2019
UI3 Welcomes Cluster Faculty Member Karen Dunn Lopez
Karen Dunn Lopez is the Director of Research for the Center for Nursing Classification and Clinical Effectiveness in the Collegeof Nursing. Her scholarship focuses on nursing informatics; identifying factors that can improve the usability and usefulness of health information technologies with the overarching goals of improved decision-making and health outcomes. To date, her research involves the novel applications of NANDA-I (Nursing Diagnosis), NIC (Nursing Intervention Classification) and NOC (Nursing Outcome Classification) to develop clinical decision-support technologies. She has served as principal investigator, or co-PI on a research grant portfolio exceeding $5.4 million, including three federal grants. Dr. Dunn Lopez led the first systematic review of clinical decision support that targets decision making by acute care nurses. She found that although technologies designed to support nurse decision making have lagged behind medical decision supports, nurse decision making is associated with improved patient outcomes. She also co-led a project to develop and test an algorithm to determine the differences between nurse and physician use of terminologies that provided quantitative evidence of the differences between nurse and physician care.