Nursing Informatics Innovators: Marion Ball
Dr. Ball’s career started in 1965 at the University of Kentucky, she worked on computerizing a clinical lab system. She also promoted and supported numerous activities in the field of Nursing Informatics. She is a co-author and edited a series of 14 volumes that were primarily introductory books on healthcare informatics, some with special emphasis on nursing informatics. During the 1990s, Dr. Ball was instrumental in promoting the Nursing Informatics Special Interest Group while she served as President of IMIA. More recently she served as a founding member of the TIGER initiative which addresses the importance of integrating technology into the nursing profession from bedside practitioners to researchers toward encouraging the nursing profession to integrate the most current enabling technologies into healthcare. She has dedicated most of her professional career to the field of Nursing Informatics as an educator at Johns Hopkins University and/or consultant to corporations such as IBM.