SUMMARY
Raga Bjarnadottir, Ph.D., M.P.H., R.N., studies how clinical documentation created by nurses and other healthcare professionals can be used to improve the safety of older adults in the hospital, with a particular focus on individuals with Alzheimer's disease and related dementias. She uses natural language processing and artificial intelligence to analyze clinical notes and identify early indicators of potentially preventable harm, including falls, delirium and functional decline. Dr. Bjarnadottir also examines how gaps and inconsistencies in documentation affect patients who have been underserved in healthcare. Her goal is to transform routine clinical documentation into actionable insights that support timely interventions by care teams and health systems.
Focus areas
- Patient safety signals in narrative notes. Dr. Bjarnadottir develops and validates language models that read free-text nursing documentation and extract specific, clinically meaningful risk factors for hospital-acquired falls. Her team built an expert-annotated reference corpus of more than 14,000 clinical concepts drawn from over 1,000 inpatient notes to train and evaluate these methods and compare them with nurse judgment.
- Emerging delirium detection. Delirium is common, harmful and frequently missed in older adults who are hospitalized. Dr. Bjarnadottir's team developed transformer-based extraction pipelines that identify eight categories of delirium symptoms in clinical narrative. The team then combined those narrative signals with structured record data to build and validate prediction models for hospitalization-induced delirium.
- Iatrogenic complications in Alzheimer's disease and related dementias. As contact principal investigator of a National Institute on Aging award, Dr. Bjarnadottir assembled a longitudinal research resource linking clinical narrative, structured hospital records and neighborhood-level social data. She uses it to study how hospital care contributes to falls, delirium and functional decline in people with dementia.
- Documentation gaps and health equality. Dr. Bjarnadottir's work shows that patients from groups underserved in healthcare, including older adults from sexual and gender minority populations that have been understudied in research, and patients with limited social support, receive less complete clinical documentation.
- Clinical tools. Working with practicing nurses, physicians and healthcare leaders, Dr. Bjarnadottir translates validated risk models into clinical decision support tools that integrate into nursing workflows. Her work includes interoperable fall prevention tools that have been developed and tested for use in primary care and rural nurse-led practices.
Significance to patient care
Older adults can experience potentially preventable harms during hospitalization, including falls, delirium, and loss of strength and independence. Nurses are often the first to recognize subtle changes in a patient's condition and document them in clinical notes, but those early warning signs can be difficult to identify across large volumes of text. Dr. Bjarnadottir develops tools that use natural language processing and artificial intelligence to analyze clinical notes and identify patients at risk of harm. Her goal is to provide care teams with timely information that supports early intervention and helps prevent complications.
Professional highlights
- Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute:
- Scientific merit reviewer, 2026-present.
- Member, Invited Stakeholder Panel, Improving Adoption of Clinical Text in Multi-Site Studies, 2025-present.
- American Medical Informatics Association:
- Member, Scientific Program Committee, Clinical Informatics Conference, 2025-present.
- Fellow, 2025.
- Member-at-large, Nursing Informatics Working Group, 2023-2024.
- Scientific member, Health Systems Research Scientific Merit Review Board, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, 2024-present.
- Associate editor, Journal of Medical Internet Research Aging, 2023-present.
- Contact principal investigator, "Advancing Interdisciplinary Science of Aging Through Identification of Iatrogenic Complications," National Institute on Aging, 2021-2025.
- Icon Award for Nursing Innovation and Creativity, Florida Nurses Association, 2024.
- Policy coordinator, Alliance for Nursing Informatics, 2018-2021.
- New Investigator Award, Interdisciplinary Research Group on Nursing Issues, AcademyHealth, 2017.