Marion Ball Nursing Informatics

Marion Ball is a Professor Emerita at Johns Hopkins University and Senior Advisor in Healthcare Informatics at IBM. According to Dr. Ball, nursing informatics is “where technology and caring meet” (2011, p.13). Ball (2011) stated that nurses must “harness their ‘caring’ passion to the use of technology and informatics” thus “improving the quality and safety of the care they provide” (p.5).

Dr. Ball’s background is not in nursing, but medical education. She began her career in a clinical laboratory as a programmer and served as liaison to the nursing department. Through this experience, Dr. Ball realized that there was a need for nursing presence during administrative decision-making especially with regards to informatics. Marion Ball sought to bridge this gap by developing educational materials on health informatics, thus beginning her professional “odyssey” into nursing informatics (AMIA, 2008).

Early in her profession, nursing was still very much a female’s vocation, so most assumed that she was a nurse. She welcomed that “hat” and became an advocate for nurses in the world of health informatics (AMIA, 2008). She met nursing resistance to involvement but responded to that resistance with encouragement and education. Dr. Ball understood that nurses were important yet underrepresented consumers of informatics (Hannah, 1999). She paved the way for nurses to become active participants in the development of HIT systems.

Dr. Ball’s specific area of interest is clinical application of informatics. She recognized a need for an international initiative in nursing informatics, leading to the creation of AMIA. This “brought the whole field of nursing informatics into the global world” (Hagland, 2014). Through her work with the TIGER Initiative, Dr. Ball seeks to “infuse clinician education” with “IT education and training” (Hagland,