Two Columbia Nursing Faculty Awarded ANF Grants

Sarah Rossetti, PhD’09, associate professor of biomedical informatics and nursing, and Maxim Topaz, PhD, Elizabeth Standish Gill Associate Professor of Nursing, have received new funding from the American Nurses Foundation’s Reimagining Nursing Initiative to scale their projects nationally. 

Rossetti's project, the CONCERN Early Warning System (EWS), uses artificial intelligence (AI) to identify deterioration risk for hospitalized patients based on patterns of nursing surveillance that can be measured using electronic health record data. The next phase of CONCERN EWS will focus on lower-resourced pediatric settings, such as community-based hospitals.  

NurseAssist - AI, led by Topaz in partnership with VNS Health, is an AI system that supports home health care nurses. Using video, audio, and electronic health record data, the project aims to reduce nurses’ documentation burden and empower them to make informed health care delivery decisions and recommendations. 

ANF will provide a total of $1.5 million for CONCERN EWS, NurseAssist –- AI, and a third nurse-led project over two years.  

“With this new phase in 2025, the American Nurses Foundation will continue to support the patient journey and well-being of nurses, while impacting health care,” Graig Eastin, ANF’s executive director, said in a press release announcing the grants.