The Rita D. Zielstorff Nursing Informatics Leadership Award

2022 Recipient: Sarah Collins Rossetti RN, PhD, FACMI, FAMIA, FAAN

(L-R Denise Goldsmith MS, MPH, RN FAAN,

Sarah C. Rossetti RN, PhD, FACMI, FAAN, Rita D. Zielstorff MS, RN)

Dr. Sarah Collins Rossetti is the 2022 Rita D. Zielstorff Nursing Informatics Leadership Award receipient. Dr. Collins began her informatics career in the Partners Healthcare System after completing her Ph.D. in Nursing Informatics at Columbia University, NY. She had a dual appointment as a Nurse Informatician in the Clinical Informatics Research and Development Department and as an Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She was also a practicing member of the Nursing Informatics staff at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

She soon began publishing her work related to clinician and patient use of electronic record systems in the Partners healthcare setting and speaking at regional, national, and international conferences on this topic. She received research grants as both Principal Investigator and Collaborative Investigator from various private and governmental entities, including the Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research (AHRQ). With this support, she analyzed nursing flowsheet documentation for patterns that identified impending deterioration in ICU patients.

She became a member of NENIC in 2011 and has remained a contributing member since then, speaking at NENIC programs and sharing her knowledge with NENIC members. She was also a respected member of the Organization of Nurse Leaders of Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

In 2018 she moved to New York, joining the New York-Presbyterian Health System as a Clinical Informatician in the Information Services Department. She joined the Columbia University Medical Center as Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Nursing in the Department of Biomedical Informatics and School of Nursing. Her work analyzing nursing documentation patterns to facilitate interdisciplinary communication in deteriorating patients has evolved into the CONCERN project. She has a grant from the American Nurses Foundation of over a million dollars to validate and implement a toolkit and spread the CONCERN clinical decision support tool to seven other hospitals. Dr Rossetti summarizes her research focus as follows:

…identifying and intervening on patient risk for harm by applying computational tools to mine and extract value from EHR data and leveraging user-centered design for patient-centered technologies.

Another focus of her work is on reducing the burden of clinician documentation in the EHR. She is currently co-chair of “25x5: Decreasing Documentation Burden on U.S. Clinicians.” This work is funded by the National Library of Medicine. Sarah has presented the ongoing work of this project to NENIC members.

Several awards and honors affirm Dr. Rossetti’s status as a national leader in nursing informatics. She has been inducted as a Fellow of the American Medical Informatics Association (FAMIA), a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics (FACMI), and a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing (FAAN). In 2019, she received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. This is the highest honor bestowed by the US government to outstanding scientists and engineers who are beginning their independent research careers and who show exceptional promise for leadership in science and technology.

 Dr. Rossetti exemplifies the qualities sought in recipients of the Rita D. Zielstorff Nursing Informatics Leadership Award.