I rebuilt this site recently, and part of being honest about that is admitting a few earlier blog posts got promised and never actually landed. This is the real first post. Consider it a proper introduction.

I'm Jerri Westphal. I spent 13 years working across nursing education, leadership, and informatics at a large academic medical center in Silicon Valley, then left to take on a regional leadership role, where I now lead informatics strategy supporting more than 16,000 nurses across multiple medical centers. Somewhere in there I also went back to school for my terminal degree, which brings my total nursing degrees to five. My DNP dissertation established a baseline assessment of AI literacy across the nursing informatics community. You can read it here.

Informatics Integrated exists because of one question that kept coming up, from nurses at the bedside wondering what informatics even is, to nurse leaders trying to figure out how to bring AI into their organizations without breaking something important along the way. This blog is where I answer that properly, instead of in a rushed reply to a LinkedIn message.

Here's what's coming next. Three posts, and I'm committing to these:

Is nursing informatics right for you? A self-assessment. A way to think through the question honestly, instead of guessing based on a job title.

Ambient AI isn't just a physician tool. What's actually happening with AI in clinical documentation right now, and what nurses specifically, not just physicians, need to understand about it.

What nursing informatics actually is. In plain language, without the jargon that usually explains the field to people who already work in it.

If a question keeps coming up in your world and you don't see a post about it here yet, tell me. That's usually how the next one gets written. And if you're past the reading-about-it stage and want to talk through where you actually are, reach out directly.