Suzanne Bakken


Suzanne B. Bakken Henry is an American nurse who is a professor of biomedical informatics at Columbia University. Her research considers health equity and informatics. She is a Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine, American College of Medical Informatics and American Academy of Nursing.

Early life and education

Bakken was an undergraduate student in nursing at Arizona State University. She earned her doctoral degree in nursing at the University of California, San Francisco. She moved to Stanford University as a United States [National Library of Medicine|National Library of Medicine] and American Nurses Foundation postdoctoral fellow.

Research and career

In 2006, Bakken joined the Columbia University Institute of Medicine. Her research combines informatics, evidence-based nursing and health equity. At Columbia, she led the Center for Evidence-based Practice in the Underserved and the pre-/post-doctoral program on Reducing Health Disparities through Informatics.
Bakken worked on the representation of nursing concepts and terminology in Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine and LOINC. She showed that using formal vocabularies to express patient problems enhanced the generalizability of research, improved the quality of health outcomes and improved the traineeship of informatics and nursing researchers. She has argued that digital infrastructure is a critical component of a health ecosystem, and that new clinical tools could be used for self-management and care. However, to make the digital infrastructure fair and equitable, it is key to improve public trust such that individuals contribute personal data and clinical experiences. Bakken developed community engagement projects to improve public trust amongst urban Latino populations.
Bakken is known for her contributions to biomedical informatics, with a focus on visual analytic innovations, training of informatics students and knowledge formalization. She spent 2015 as a Scholar in Residence at the National Academy of Medicine. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Bakken was supported by the National Institutes of Health to create a visualization toolbox to address COVID-19 misinformation and hesitation around testing and vaccination.

Awards and honors

Selected publications

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