Informatics and data science perspective on Future of Nursing 2020-2030: Charting a pathway to health equity

The Future of Nursing 2020 to 2030 report explicitly addresses the need for integration of nursing expertise in designing, generating, analyzing, and applying data to support initiatives focused on social determinants of health (SDOH) and health equity. The metrics necessary to enable and evaluate progress on all recommendations require harnessing existing data sources and developing new ones, as well as transforming and integrating data into information systems to facilitate communication, information sharing, and decision making among the key stakeholders. We examine the recommendations of the 2021 report through an interdisciplinary lens that integrates nursing, biomedical informatics, and data science by addressing three critical questions: (a) what data are needed?, (b) what infrastructure and processes are needed to transform data into information?, and (c) what information systems are needed to "level up" nurse-led interventions from the micro-level to the meso- and macro-levels to address social determinants of health and advance health equity?