Patricia Abbott PhD, RN, MS, FAAN, FACMI

Dr. Abbott is an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan School of Nursing. Prior to arriving at U-M, she was an Associate Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing and Medicine. She completed a 2-year post-doctoral NIH-funded research fellowship in the Department of Computer Science in the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory (HCIL) at the University of Maryland College Park where she focused on the design of usable and error-mitigating HIT. Dr. Abbott extended her research background in knowledge discovery in large datasets (data analytics) at the HCIL by also focusing on visualization (making sense of huge collections of healthcare data in a way that provides value), human-computer interaction, and user-centered design. 

Dr. Abbott is interested in studying the impact of telehealth technologies on disease self-management, particularly in vulnerable populations of home-dwelling congestive heart failure patients. She has served as a member of the Board of Directors of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) and the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association Editorial Board. She is a current member of the Biomedical Computing and Health Informatics Study Section at the US National Institutes of Health. She is a co-editor of NISTIR 7804 & NISTIR 7865, two recent NIST Certification Standards for US Electronic Health Record Systems (National Institutes of Science & Technology/NIST; US Department of Commerce). 

Dr. Abbott is passionate about developing IT for low-resource settings to increase health knowledge distribution to nurses and other caregivers in remote communities. Her work in using knowledge networks optimized for low bandwidth areas has led to involvement with the Rockefeller Foundation, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), and the World Health Organization (WHO). She is currently a member of the WHO e-Health Technical Advisory Group.