Kim Paxton, DNP, APRN, ANP-BC, LHIT-C is an assistant professor of nursing and the adult geriatric nurse practitioner program specialty director for the University of Colorado Anschutz Campus. She earned her Doctorate of Nursing Practice (DNP) along with a Leadership in Health Informational Technology Certificate (LHIT-C) from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities in 2012; her MSN as an Adult Nurse Practitioner from Marquette University in 1999. She is an ANCC board certified adult nurse practitioner and advanced practice registered nurse (APRN) with a clinical practice focus of health promotion and prevention through a integrative medicine approach

Both her academic and practice passion lies in translating current health promotion theoretical research into relevant translatable knowledge for provider education and realistic patient centered interventions. She began researching and addressing the self-care health practices of care providers during her doctoral education and continues to explore, develop and disseminate strategies to enhance self-care provider health and improve translation of these practices to patients. She believes that self-care is not intuitive and the concepts underlying engagement just as complex as those that underlie health. She has a strong belief that provider curriculum needs to change to address this paradigm of thinking and have flipped APRN education from a disease based focus to a heath based focus. These focus emphases how self-care, from an adaptive to a maladaptive frame of reference, interplays into determining individual health and disease development.