It is with sadness that we share the news about the passing of Dr. Virginia Saba with the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) community. Dr. Saba’s passing will be felt by so many around the world, in particular the Nursing Informatics community, our thoughts go out to her family during this time.

IMIA shares the loss of Dr. Saba with our good friends, the  American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), known as the force in Nursing Informatics, she has touched and inspired so many.

As noted in her biography, in IMIA’s recently published history book, the International Medical Informatics and the Transformation of Healthcare, Virginia started her journey into the field of informatics as the coding supervisor of a NIH funded national study to examine the perinatal experience of 50,000 pregnant women. Her early work led her to complete a master’s and Doctoral degrees in Science of Technology Management Information from American University in Washington, DC.  Her early work provided the foundation for her mission to ensure that nursing data could be used to make nursing care visible. To accomplish this, Virginia developed the Clinical Care Classification (CCC) System, which is used in the US and in several countries.

Throughout the decades, Dr. Saba made significant contributions to foster the development of the discipline of nursing informatics. She was instrumental in establishing many conferences (first Tri-Service Medical Information System (TRIMIS) conference in 1970l; five NIH national conferences related to Computers in Nursing; first nursing sessions at the Fifth Annual Symposium on Computer Applications in Medical Care (SCAMC), now known as American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA). She helped establish the first special interest group at SCAMC in 1981 which is now AMIA’s Nursing Informatics Working Group and the Council on Computer Applications in Nursing (CCAIN) at the ANA. Among her many AMIA accomplishments, Dr. Saba initiated the AMIA Pioneers in Nursing Informatics History project and was recognized as a Pioneer.  The video and transcript of her interview can be found at: https://amia.org/community/working-groups/nursing-informatics/nursing-informatics-innovators-virginia-k-saba

Dr. Saba was a long standing member of IMIA’s Nursing Informatics Special Interest Group, IMIA NI, serving as the chair from 2001 – 2004 and was recently profiled by Dr. Diane Skiba in  IMIA’s Nursing Informatics Special Interest Group’s October 2021 Newsletter .   A tribute has been posted on the IMIA NI LinkedIn Page at https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6868233313912463361.