She has over 25 years’ experience in health care and maintains a part-time clinical practice in emergency nursing. As an informaticist she has worked with emergency department data and terminology standards, and text processing. She currently has a National Library of Medicine grant to adapt natural language processing tools for public health surveillance. She also does clinical decision support research on triage in emergency departments, and is currently working with the CDC to expand triage models to other settings in pandemic influenza situations. Debbie has a Master’s in Nursing in Health Care Systems and a doctorate in Information Science.