Brennan to head NIH medical library

Patti Brennan has been appointed to take over the United States National Library of Medicine after a career making digital tools for housebound patients and systems for electronic medical records.

Brennan is a professor of nursing and engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She created the ComputerLink network to connect patients and caregivers at home to reduce feelings of isolation and improve care. She also directed Project HealthDesign, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which envisioned a new type of medical record that included patients’ observations of their own health.

The library houses and manages the National Institutes of Health’s physical and digital documents collection. That includes the MEDLINE database, which is freely accessible via the internet, and other NIH databases.