In November 2021, we heard the sad news of the passing away of Dr. Virginia Saba, EdD, Honorary PhD, DS, RN, FAAN, FACMI, LL, President and CEO SabaCare, Inc.
Virginia Saba was a pioneer in nursing informatics. Already in the nineties of the last century, she developed the Home Health Care Classification (HHCC) with a funded research grant. This system consisted of two Taxonomies: The HHCC Nursing Diagnoses – by officially using NANDA diagnoses in the system – and the HHCC Nursing Interventions that were classified into 20 Care Components.
In 2003, the system was adapted and renamed as Clinical Care Classification (CCC), and Dr. Saba founded SabaCare Inc. The CCC now consists of a four-level framework/hierarchy that allows data to be statistically aggregated upward or parsed downward to the smallest atomic-level data element, the 1st level: Four healthcare patterns; 2nd level: 21 care components (classes); 3rd level: Nursing terminologies (176 nursing diagnoses, 804 nursing interventions/actions, 528 nursing outcomes); 4th level: Three outcome qualifiers and four action type qualifiers.
Virginia Saba strongly supported the integration of the CCC into electronic healthcare documentation systems. Dr. Saba was a person known and respected by many. With her strong and enthusiastic personality, she supported Nursing Informatics experts around the world. Virginia was also a keynote speaker at ACENDIO Conferences in Vienna, Austria (2002), Swansea, Wales (2003), and in Madeira, Portugal (2011); and her support for the development of nursing documentation was significant.
As ACENDIO Board, we will miss her contributions to charismatically led discussions for strengthening nursing in the Nursing Informatics work.
