NQF Welcomes Rosemary Kennedy, Senior Director of Nursing and Healthcare Informatics 

Washington DC (September 1, 2009) - The National Quality Forum (NQF) has tapped Rosemary Kennedy, RN, MBA, as its new senior director of nursing and healthcare informatics. Ms. Kennedy joins NQF from Siemens Healthcare, where she was the Chief Nursing Informatics Officer, helping to improve nursing workflow and increase clinical efficiencies and quality in healthcare through use of information technology.

NQF is a unique, multi-stakeholder, nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the quality of American healthcare by setting national priorities and goals for performance improvement, endorsing national consensus standards for measuring and publicly reporting on performance, and promoting the attainment of national goals through education and outreach programs.

“Advances in health information technology have great potential to improve quality and efficiency and make our healthcare system higher performing. This is especially true in nursing, as nurses are often the frontline caregivers,” said Janet Corrigan, NQF President and CEO. “Rosemary Kennedy’s expertise and experience in informatics and nursing will help NQF ensure that emerging electronic data platforms support nursing practice quality and efficiency.”

In her role at NQF, Ms. Kennedy will assist in managing and developing NQF’s health information technology projects aimed at facilitating the development of an HIT infrastructure capable of measuring and improving care coordination. She also will help specify the flow of electronic information through the care delivery process necessary to enable clinical decision support and automated reporting of outcomes.

Ms. Kennedy has more than 20 years of experience in nursing quality and informatics. She has been named to Modern Healthcare’s list of the “Top 25 Women in Healthcare” and received the HIMSS 2009 National Nursing Informatics Award. While at Siemens she was the first nurse to become a Global Key Expert for advancing technology integration into nursing practice, and in 2008 she became a fellow in the American Academy of Nursing.

Ms. Kennedy is a member of the International Nursing Honor Society. She received Master of Business Administration and Bachelor of Science in Nursing degrees from Widner University. She is currently working toward a PhD at Loyola University Niehoff School of Nursing.

“NQF plays an important role in answering the challenges and opportunities in developing an effective HIT infrastructure and ensuring HIT tools enhance quality and efficiency,” said Ms. Kennedy. “I look forward to working within NQF to answer these challenges, especially as they relate to nursing science and care.”

The mission of the National Quality Forum is to improve the quality of American healthcare by setting national priorities and goals for performance improvement, endorsing national consensus standards for measuring and publicly reporting on performance, and promoting the attainment of national goals through education and outreach programs. NQF, a non-profit organization (qualityforum.org) with diverse stakeholders across the public and private health sectors, was established in 1999 and is based in Washington, DC.