| Patricia C. Dykes, PhD, MA, RN
Dr. Dykes received her bachelor of science in Nursing from Fairfield University, a Masters in Nursing from NYU, and a doctorate in nursing informatics from Columbia. She joined Partners HealthCare (now Mass General Brigham) in Boston in 2004 as corporate manager for nursing informatics and research. She is a senior nurse scientist and research program director at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Dykes was an early innovator in the development of clinical pathways as a decision support approach and subsequently in integration of clinical pathways into electronic health records as part of a multi-faceted, patient-centered, interdisciplinary approach to enhancing guideline-based care. Her first two books on the topic were published in 1997 and 1998 and subsequently translated into Japanese and German, and use widely to guide content standardization efforts in the U.S., Asia and in Europe.
As principal investigator of an interdisciplinary research project funded by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Dr. Dykes led a team that established a link between a standardized fall risk scale with individualized tailored interventions to prevent patient falls in hospitals. This was the first randomized controlled trial to document use of health information technologies to establish a linkage between fall risk assessment, tailored interventions and decreased patient falls in acute hospital settings.
Dr. Dykes and her team developed a decision-support and communication intervention for use by the care team, patients and family members to prevent patient falls. In addition, she is conducting research on the bedside data needs and preferences of hospitalized patients, and evaluating the adequacy of standardized nursing terminologies to support measurement of nursing workload and cost of care as a byproduct of clinical documentation.
Dr. Dykes has been active in a variety of professional societies, and has had leadership positions in nursing informatics at the Americam Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), the Health Information Managements and Systems Society (HIMSS), and the Alliance for Nursing Informatics. She has been recognized for these contributions by receiving the HIMSS Nursing Informatics Leadership Award, her election as a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing, and her election as a Fellow to the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI). She is the 20-21 President/Board Chair of AMIA.
