Nursing leadership shows up in many forms, and Cleveland Clinic nurses find countless avenues for pursuing meaningful careers while expanding knowledge and contributing to an ever-growing national community of care. In the series “Qualities of Leadership,” nurses whos have made a difference within and beyond the Cleveland Clinic health system talk about their career trajectories, explain what energizes them about their areas of specialty, and offer thoughts on what will be important to nursing in the future.

As a nursing informatics manager, Sarah Croes, BSN, MSITM, BGS, RN-BC, SPHIMS, CAPM, manages teams that support Epic® software for inpatient nursing. During her five years at Cleveland Clinic, she has worked as a programmer, inpatient RN, clinical analyst and manager.

Croes began her career as a computer scientist, during which she won awards for developing programming efficiencies and forecasting applications that could predict future outcomes in specific scenarios. She worked with a number of corporate clients in those days, but Cleveland Clinic was her favorite, she says. She decided to return to school to pursue a nursing degree, and although she was raising children at the time, she managed to graduate at the top of her class.

She was a clinical nurse initially but always expected to move into informatics, since it is the perfect combination of the computer science and nursing disciplines. “Nursing informatics is the synthesis of nursing practice, computer science and information technology, which is great for me since I have worked in all these areas,” Croes says.

The nursing informatics teams make improvements to Epic so that electronic documentation enhances rather than hinders practice, Croes says. Projects include reporting, decision support, documentation optimization and nurse-driven requests. “I love working with clinicians to discover better ways to address problems,” Croes says. “We do a lot of analysis, innovation and troubleshooting, but it all comes back to improving patient care. One small change can impact thousands of caregivers.”

Social: A career in informatics allows Cleveland Clinic nurse Sarah Croes to blend expertise in computers and caregiving.