University at Buffalo School of Nursing
Buffalo, New York
Sharon Hewner, PhD is currently an Associate Professor at the University at Buffalo, School of Nursing and Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing.
As a nurse anthropologist, Dr. Hewner understands the critical impact of social context on health, leading to her interest in social and behavioral determinants of health. As an innovator in informatics and data science, Dr. Hewner developed clinical decision support to assess social determinants and use Medicaid claims’ data to demonstrate the value of nursing interventions. Current work as a committed member of the Gravity Project with a focus on housing insecurity led to development of cross-sector health information exchange during the Covid-19 pandemic for persons know to the Housing Management Information System (HMIS).
Career cornerstones include developing informatics tools to improve care transitions, using big data to understand population health, and leveraging expertise in anthropology and cross-cultural analysis. Dr Hewner’s work couples social science, family medicine, nursing, gerontology with expertise in biomedical informatics, engineering, computer science. Her health systems research identifies opportunities to link health data across settings and improve the use of health information exchange to inform redesign of the electronic health record. The AHRQ-funded Coordinating Transitions project exemplifies this; demonstrating the feasibility of using existing regional health information exchange to identify the population at risk for hospital readmission, deliver care alerts to a RN care coordinator, and incorporate critical information into the EHR. As nursing moves to community-based, technology-driven care, Dr. Hewner’s background in data analytics, interprofessional collaboration, and technology aligns to transform care delivery to persons with complex, chronic disease.
Dr. Hewner received her BS in Nursing and MS in Gerontological Nursing from the University of Rochester and her PhD in Anthropology from the University at Buffalo, SUNY. Her clinical practice includes experience in healthcare delivery across the continuum of care (intensive care to home care) and now extends into cross-sector collaborative care for vulnerable populations.