Riza Barotac
Nurse Informaticist
When someone asks Riza “Why did you become a nurse?” she always replies and says with a smile, “Because of my mom.” Riza’s mother, Corazon Barotac, served as her inspiration and role model for the type of person she would like to be — both as a nurse and an individual. Corazon’s path to nursing started in the Philippines in the 1970s. There she received her bachelor’s degree in nursing from the University of the Philippines, one of the first collegiate nursing programs in the country, founded in 1948, and based on the work and curricula of Filipina nurse Julita Sotejo. She migrated to the United States during the nurse staffing crisis in the 1980s and became a highly respected nurse who worked most of her career in the Telemetry Unit at Newark Beth Israel in New Jersey. Growing up, Riza saw the compassion, kindness, warmth, and empathy Corazon projected not only to her patients but also toward her loved ones. Before the 2020 pandemic, she retired after 45 years of nursing.
Riza chose to begin her nursing career as a Licensed Practical Nurse (LPN) through Lincoln Technical Institute and “worked her way up” so she could gain more knowledge and be exposed to different avenues of nursing. Over six years, she worked with geriatric populations in various settings, from nursing homes, long-term acute care, and sub-acute/rehabilitation centers, and during this time decided to advance her education through an LPN-RN bridge associate degree program with the Trinitas School of Nursing.
After graduating in 2016, she pivoted from geriatrics to surgery. Her first peri-operative experience was working in Newark Beth Israel (NBI) working across many services — pediatrics, general, robotic surgery, cardio-thoracic, trauma, urology, vascular, ENT, plastics, orthopedics, neurology, pain management, and bariatrics surgeries. At NBI she was introduced to the world of electronic health record systems (EMR), the software that houses all the patients’ charts and clinical information. She became hooked and fascinated with the system's intricacies and often collaborated with senior staff members to optimize it for clinicians and patients, eventually becoming a “super user.” She was also appointed as the Patient Safety Officer for Peri-operative services. Through this collaboration and role, senior members encouraged and supported her to pivot her career into nursing informatics.
At first, she was hesitant to return to academia since she was already juggling the precarious balance of working full-time, caring for an infant, and everyday responsibilities. The thought of going to school felt too taxing for her, but ultimately with the strong support system she received from her husband and family members, she decided to enroll in an online nursing program that provided a flexible BSN-MSN track for Nursing Informatics. During the pandemic, she received her bachelor’s degree from Chamberlain University in 2020 and was recognized as part of the Sigma Theta Tau International Honor Society. During and after receiving her degree, she continued to work in peri-operative departments at Morristown Memorial Hospital and Saint Peter’s University Hospital, and in 2021, she completed her Master’s in Nursing Informatics with a focus on the enhancement of clinical electronic documentation for Surgical Site Infection prophylaxis treatment.
“Although I have more than 12 years of experience in nursing ranging from geriatric population to the peri-operative services, I feel like I pressed reset in this new journey that I am undertaking in this Nursing Informatics field” — Riza
A month later after completing her Master’s, she welcomed her second child. As her priorities changed, she realized she needed a more flexible work-life balance with another addition to her growing family. She started as a Nursing Informatics Liaison at CareWell Health Hospital in 2021, where she developed and educated staff on the EMR system and helped build the informatics infrastructure for a new surgical spine program. Later that year transitioned into a fully remote Clinical Application Analyst at Saint Peter’s University. In this role, she collaborates with clinicians on integrated testing, software implementation, and troubleshooting issues to help improve the technological experience for clinicians and patients.
More About Riza
Watch Riza’s Nurses You Should Know video here
To learn more about nursing education in the Philippines, read here.
Learn about the Philippine Nurse Association of America here.
Honor the Philippine healthcare workers who have died in the pandemic here.
Sources
The information above was sourced from Riza Barotac.
Learn More
To learn more about inclusion in nursing and to be part of the national discussion to address racism in nursing, check out and share the following resources:
Know Your History
- Nursing CLIO to engage with historians and scholars committed to deep work around historical accuracy in healthcare and nursing.
- American Association for the History of Nursing to attend monthly webinars on topics of nursing history, view the calendar here.
Examine Bias
- NurseManifest to attend live zoom sessions with fellow nurses on nursing’s overdue reckoning on racism or to sign their pledge.
- Breaking Bias in Healthcare, an online course created by scientist Anu Gupta, to learn how bias is related to our brain’s neurobiology and can be mitigated with mindfulness.
- Revolutionary Love Learning Hub provides free tools for learners and educators to use love as fuel towards ourselves, our opponents, and to others so that we can embody a world where we see no strangers.
Support & Advocate
- National Coalition for Ethnic Minority Nurse Association to stay engaged with topics relevant to nurses of color.
Help us paint the internet with nursing’s diverse origin stories. Follow this Medium publication, NursesYouShouldKnow on Instagram, LinkedIn, or Facebook, or @KnowNurses on Twitter to share and re-post our articles far and wide.
