U. to offer Nursing, SEAS degree

Will the next Bill Gates hold a degree from Penn's Nursing School? Although that's not exactly the stated goal of administrators in the Nursing School and the School of Engineering and Applied Science, a recently-created joint-degree program between the two schools is geared toward equipping students with the skills necessary to design computer applications for the health care industry. Acting Nursing Undergraduate Dean Kathleen McCauley said the Nursing Informatics program will nurture a new kind of health care professional able to organize and analyze data for the purpose of improving care and making it more efficient. "It's a brand new way of thinking of things," McCauley said. The program will enroll its first students this September with the Class of 2002. Since the program is a four-year course of study, students must apply to enter the program when they apply to the University. Officials expect two or three students to join the program each year. "I think it will start small but will escalate," Weaver said. Nursing Informatics students will take courses in the Nursing and Engineering schools, as well as some specially designed courses in physics, chemistry and computer science, among other subjects. McCauley explained that health care professionals are constantly looking at ways computers can help them improve the quality of care at hospitals, clinics, health insurance companies and community health agencies. In a hospital, for instance, many variables -- such as a patient's diagnosis, the cost of tests and medicines, and the types of doctors needed to treat an illness -- contribute to the process of treating a patient. All of these variables need to fit together efficiently to provide high-quality care. This is where a student of informatics enters the picture. Health care institutions need people to "design programs that will collect large amounts of data relative to health care in order to analyze this data to direct health care decisions," said Nursing Professor Terri Weaver, who helped develop the joint-degree program. The ultimate goal is cost-effective but high-quality care, she added. Nursing sophomore Kathryn Kalbach said the new joint-degree program sounded interesting. But she wondered why health care institutions would need nurses to do tasks best left to computer experts. "I don't know if there's a need for [someone certified as a nurse] to collect data like that," Kalbach said. But Weaver stressed that this combination of nursing and engineering skills is exactly what health care systems are looking for. Someone with a background in nursing as well as computers will be better able to design programs responsive to the needs of doctors and patients because such a person will understand the inner workings of the health care field, officials explained. "We tend to have a cadre of people well-prepared in informatics, but who don't have the background in clinical practice," McCauley said. Nursing Informatics is the Nursing School's second joint-degree program. Health Care Management, a program with the Wharton School, enrolled its first six students last fall.