[Bill Stead] Patti Brennan has shown the power of working across boundaries in science and engineering and all of the great advances come at those intersections.

[Teresa Zayas Caban] She has really pushed the informatics community to think about individuals and caregivers in a different way.

[Charles Safran] I think Patti is a great example of if you just keep your eye on patient care if you just do the right thing by our fellow citizens good things happen.

[David Bates] Dr. Brennan is a pioneer and she's made a lasting impression on health care and biomedicine. Her work involves a skilled integration of disciplines in ways that have been transformative.

[Suzanne Bakken] Patti has combined what she learned as both a critical care and a psych mental health nurse with her engineering background.

But everything that she's done through the years really has been approached from a very holistic nursing perspective.

[Patti Brennan] Most of the projects that I developed had to do with improving people's ability to live at home, take care of themselves, reduce their sense of being alone, provide professional support when it was needed, and make use of as much as possible existing technologies early on.

[Suzanne Bakken] She was one of the first people to take advantage of the Internet and this was in the years before there was a World Wide Web and to use that technology to focus on both decision support and social support from caregivers of those who were living with dementia and also persons living with HIV/AIDS.

[Bill Stead] She applied the principles of user centered design in a large scale to bring together patients families and disciplines including art, architecture, biomedicine, design, engineering and health. And these teams built visions of how individuals wanted to interact in the digital world.

And these visions have since come to life in what we think of as mobile health and the inn of one citizen science.

[Patti Brennan] What I it was experiencing in the 90s was this sense from clinicians of "oh my god I'm so busy don't let them bring me any web printouts or don't have them sending me email" and they missed the idea that health it happens every day it doesn't happen just in the clinic.

The idea of showing a trajectory of a health problem -- the points along the health trajectory where a professionals are encountered and the white space in between. This is what we call the "Care between the Care." This is where people live every day and our job as as the future designers of a health system are to not only think about how we provide care to people when they're in front of us but how we provide care when it's between the care visit.

[Charles Safran] The effect that Patti has on health care is really both in the kinds of work that she's undertaken but more importantly how she's affected and trained the many people who have had the opportunity to work with her over the years.

[Pattie Brennan] My lab was always a mixed group of people -- other disciplines: physicians, psychiatrists, social workers involved with us -- but mostly we had engineering and nursing.

[Teresa Zzayas Caban] It was actually a great asset for anybody in engineering to try to get into healthcare if you don't interact with folks with a clinical background and you don't interact directly with the healthcare delivery system how are you actually going to learn how to apply tools from engineering to solve healthcare problems.

[Patti Brennan] One of the things that was so exciting for me to hear one day -- one of the engineering students was giving a research seminar and he was explaining a health problem and they were trying to figure out how to address this problem and he said "and then we got stuck so we asked the nurses this particular question" and and what was so great about that was that I we were taking a generation of engineers and having them see that that healthcare requires a whole team.

[Milton Corn] The 21st century National Library of Medicine will see itself as an information source for the world population. I think it probably is an enormous evolutionary step of great value and I think Patti just brings us one step higher.

[Patti Brennan] I Patricia Flatley Brennan. [Francis Collins] Do solemnly swear. [Patti Brennan] Do solemnly swear that I will support and defend Constitution of the United States...

[Patti Brennan] it is as as surprising to me as to anyone in the country that I'm the director of the National Library of Medicine right now. I had a whole different future plan for myself -- one that was frankly much more motivated by my personal passions for safe housing and secure food for everyone in the world and that's where I was going to spend my next phase of my career. The opportunity to direct the National Library of Medicine -- building on the great advances that Dr. Lindberg and Betsy Humphreys provided for us -- it was something too great to pass on.

The possibility of characterizing health broader than biomedical domains, including health, lifestyle, including social interactions, including sense of well-being -- realizing that information alone doesn't make people's lives better, but pathways to information, research about how to best use it and integrate into policy, and tools to make it visible to people would make it work. So I could bring my understanding over the years of health and the everyday experience of people's lives into the framing of a library that became a part of the everyday experience of people's lives, whether they be a scientist, a patient, a mom.

[Connor Murphy] Hi my name is Connor Murphy and I'm 11 years old and I'm going to be today interviewing my mom.

[Patti Brennan] When my son was 11 years old StoryCorps came to Madison.

One of his questions was "what do you want to be known for?" Now when a kid asks a mom "what do you want to be known for" -- I'm thinking I'm an academic I wanna be known for... but what do you want to be known for? So what I want to be known for is a career that focused on taking what we know in biomedical informatics and expanding the the user group -- the stakeholder group -- to patients and families to make these amazing tools that we're investing in: technologies, terminologies, interfaces, and and make sure that we remember the most important person in the healthcare process is the patient.

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Last Reviewed: November 6, 2018