Norma Lang Named Distinguished Professor at UWM

MILWAUKEE – Norma Lang, the Lillian S. Brunner Professor of Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing and the Visiting Aurora Distinguished Professor of Healthcare Quality and Informatics of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee College of Nursing, has been named a UW System Distinguished Professor. She is one of only 20 Wisconsin distinguished professors in the system, and one of seven at UWM.

Lang, an internationally known expert in establishing methods to measure nursing quality, is the former dean of the UWM College of Nursing and University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. She is actively involved in the recently announced Wisconsin Institute for Biomedical and Health Technologies (WIBHT). WIBHT, announced in early May, champions interdisciplinary teams from industry and the academic world engaging in public-private partnerships in research and development to benefit the Wisconsin economy.

Lang, as part of her sabbatical, returned to Wisconsin year to lead a collaborative project on nursing informatics involving UWM’s College of Nursing, Aurora Health Care and the Cerner Corporation. That project is developing better ways to bring the latest knowledge developments to nurses and practice. The project also is helping to capture and codify the work that nurses do in educating patients, coordinating care with other medical and social agencies, helping patients and families deal with stress, and promoting preventive care. That information, in turn, will be used to make links between the work of nurses and the outcomes for patients, eventually developing ways to improve the outcomes. UWM’s College of Nursing identifies current knowledge and participates with Cerner and Aurora in the design of intelligent systems to provide computerized clinical decision support and documentation for practicing nurses. This will allow nurses to research their practices and make suggestions for improvement.

Lang is a pioneer in the field of quality assurance in nursing. Her nursing quality model - known as the Lang Model - has been adopted in the United States, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom. She also led the development of a groundbreaking international classification system that serves as a common tool to describe and compare nursing practices. Lang is the recipient of many national awards and has held leadership positions with the American Nurses Association, American Academy of Nursing, American Association of Colleges of Nursing and Institute of Medicine. She has been honored by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations with the prestigious Codman Award for championing the use of outcomes to improve patient care.

Begun in 1987, the UW System Distinguished Professorship program recognizes and supports faculty research in areas of vital or emerging economic significance to Wisconsin. The state provides funding for 20 positions, no more than half of which may be at any one campus. Each professor is paired with a business that benefits directly from the research and provides matching funds for each of five years, the length of the professorship. Many are renewed and continue far beyond five years.