School of Nursing Quantitative Medicine with Minakshi Tikoo
The nursing profession is justly proud of its ethos of caring and holistic healing. However, nursing is also built on a foundation of careful attention to documenting and analyzing statistical information about a patient or patient population. Florence Nightingale was, after all, the first female Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society and an honorary member of the American Statistical Association.
Accordingly, Dr. Minakshi Tikoo, professor in residence and director of health information technology, has been appointed to the School of Nursing to assist in biomedical informatics curriculum development and delivery for nursing students.
She is also director of business intelligence and shared analytics for the Connecticut Department of Social Services. Prior to her appointment here, she was assistant professor in UConn Health’s department of community medicine and health care.
“Nurses have a unique perspective in the delivery of care,” Tikoo explained. “And are usually very close to the patients but also the family and caregivers. I think this will result in potential collaboration to submit grants with a unique focus.”
Tikoo’s profoundly interdisciplinary work has a foundation in her equally interdisciplinary academic background, including graduate degrees in education, family therapy, and human ecology, as well as biomedical informatics.
Regarding her research agenda Tikoo explained, “My area of research is somewhat new in its focus on applied informatics and state policy. I study the impact of health information technology implementations on health outcomes.”
Interprofessional collaboration is one benefit of this joint appointment. “I collaborate with locally based health care organizations and many state-agency partners,” Tikoo explained. “I also collaborate with colleagues from the Center on Aging.”
“I think it would be important to underscore that the technologies in health information technology are in their infancy,” Tikoo reminded us. “And there is going to be a tremendous amount of change and innovation that we will see in this area in the next decade.”
