Nursing Informatics Innovators: Susan J. Grobe
Dr. Grobe is known for her contributions to nursing informatics education and science. She hosted the first national continuing education conference on Computer Assisted Instruction (CAI) at The University of Texas, Austin (1983), and with Dr. Gary Hales, initiated the newsletter on CAI, which evolved as the journal, Computers in Nursing. With funding from USDHHS, Division of Nursing and JB Lippincott, she developed the Nursing Education Module Authoring System (NEMAS), a set of software programs for faculty use in creating CAI modules on nursing process.
Subsequently, with additional federal funding from the National Institute for Nursing Research (NINR) and National Library of Medicine (NLM) she developed the Nursing Intervention Lexicon and Taxonomy (NILT) and studied automated classification of nursing interventions. She counts among her 'firsts' the following: first of two nurse fellows elected to the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI); first nurse invited to serve on the NLM Board of Scientific Counselors; first nurse to serve as host for the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) Nursing Informatics Symposia (1994, San Antonio, TX. For the first time, graduate students were invited to volunteer for the conference and to submit poster presentations. Conference proceedings were used to publish a nursing informatics book, and to endow a graduate student nurse endowment for American Medical Informatics Association. She has published extensively in scientific and educational journals, and authored one of the first computer books for nurses, Computer Primer and Resource Guides for Nurses (1984).