Dr. Patricia Dykes

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 in Boston in 2004 as corporate manager for nursing informatics and research. At the time of her election she was a senior nurse scientist and research program director at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Dykes was an early innovator in 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 has been active in a variety of professional societies, and has had leadership positions in nursing informatics in AMIA, the Health Information Managements and Systems Society (HIMSS), and the Alliance for Nursing Informatics. She has been recognized for these contributions by the HIMSS Nursing Informatics Leadership Award, her election as a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing, and now by election to the College.