Meet the faculty:
Heather A. Shirk, Ph.D., MSN, BA, RN-BC
Dr. Heather Shirk works as an informatics nurse at WellSpan Health. She joined the informatics team there in 2017 when they converted their hospitals to using Epic software. Before informatics, she worked as a nurse manager for a behavioral health unit. She completed her doctoral work at Widener University, exploring nursing perceptions of interruptive clinical decision support alerts in electronic health records. Her work received the Dean’s Award for Excellence, Ph.D. Her research interests include patient aggression and violence. Her validation study was the first published work to validate an aggression assessment for use in medical-surgical units.
She enjoys combining all aspects of her experience and education in her work. She enjoys analyzing data, processes, and exploring ways to improve healthcare delivery for workers and our patients, including aspects of behavioral science in working with electronic health records and with clinical decision support.
She is an active member of the American Nursing Informatics Association and the Nursing Knowledge Big Data Initiative.
She lives in Lancaster County, near Lititz, with her husband and teenage daughter. She also has two dogs: a senior Chihuahua and a Beagle. The beagle often likes to "work" with her and will often hang out/sleep in her office.
- D. (Widener University)
- MSN (Eastern Mennonite University)
- BSN (Eastern Mennonite University)
- ASN (PA College of Health Sciences)
- BA (Millersville University)
- HLTH 500 Health Informatics
- Informatics
- Clinical Decision Support
- Technology
- Behavioral Health