Today Firas wished the DBMI ladies a Happy Ada Lovelace Day. After I looked it up I decided to participate.
According to http://findingada.com,
Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines.
So, I admit I didn’t do a TON of research, but I wanted to choose a female pioneer in informatics. After a little bit of Googling, I decided on Ruth Dayhoff.
The National Library of Medicine has a great biography about Ruth Dayhoff as part of their “Changing the Face of Medicine” exhibition about women physicians.
She describes how she got informatics, saying
“I was interested in [computers, medicine, and biology] as I was growing up, and I had a choice whether to study computer science or go to medical school. So I decided to go to medical school to better understand not only the treatment of patients but the actions and knowledge of physicians…However, in the end, after completing a residency in clinical pathology, I decided that I could contribute the most by bringing computer applications to medicine.”
I think this describes how most members of the informatics community got to where they are today – I know that’s how I got into it, only I skipped the medical school step and got into a PhD program (which wasn’t an option back in those days).
Ruth Dayhoff is most well-known for her contributions to the MUMPS language and VistA (the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture).
When asked how she makes a difference, Ruth Dayhoff responded
“I make a difference through my work in developing a multimedia patient record that can provide integrated information to physicians quickly and efficiently so medical decisions can be made optimally. Medicine is an information intensive profession, and this system changes the way medicine is practiced.”
Here’s to Ruth Dayhoff and the other amazing women in Informatics and technology!
