ABSTRACT
14Just as the study of man leads us to look back to our evolutionary ancestors and the study of flight leads us to explore history well before the Wright brothers’ first success at Kitty Hawk, the study of nursing informatics (NI) appropriately begins decades before the discipline was created. In the 1940s, nurses were adopting classification, information management, and operations research methods to understand the science of nursing. Many of the nurses who were leading activities to quantify nursing outcomes, methods, resource models, and practices were the same nurses who quickly adopted computers to support this work. This early history of NI prior to its formalization as a specialty is important for fully appreciating the discipline’s current accomplishments.
