About our author
Susan M. Turley, MA (Educ), BSN, RN, RHIT, is a full-time author and editor who has extensive experience in both the medical and educational fields.
As a healthcare professional, Susan has worked in a variety of settings: acute care/ICU, long-term care, physicians' offices, and managed care. She has held positions as an intensive care nurse, plasmapheresis nurse, and medical transcriptionist; physician office auditor and director of quality management and corporate compliance for an HMO; and director of quality management, infection control, physician credentialing, and medical records for a large skilled nursing facility.
As an adjunct professor in the School of Health, Wellness, and Physical Education at Anne Arundel Community College in Arnold, Maryland, Susan taught courses in medical terminology, pathophysiology, pharmacology, and medical transcription. She assisted in obtaining initial accreditation for the college's medical assisting program. Susan was a codeveloper of the nationally acclaimed The SUM Program for Medical Transcription Training and reference books for Health Professions Institute. She developed the curricula for the bachelor, master's, and doctoral programs for the International Institute of Original Medicine. Susan has been a guest speaker at national seminars for accreditation of utilization management programs, medical transcription teacher training, and health information management certification examination review seminars.
Susan is also the author of Understanding Pharmacology for Health Professionals, 6th Edition (Pearson, 2022) and more than 40 articles published in medical transcription and health information management journals. With physician authors, she has co-written three nationally funded grants and two chapters in physicians' anesthesiology and ENT textbooks. Susan has also coauthored numerous abstracts and articles published in nationally known journals, and she was the editor of an opinion column that appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in 2016. Most recently, she contributed as a subject matter expert in nursing and pharmacology for the 4th edition of Pearson's Nursing: A Concept-Based Approach to Learning.
In between updating editions of her own textbooks, Susan does medical editing on projects such as Nursing: A Concept-Based Approach to Learning, 4th Edition, 2023. She also creates indexes for medical, pharmacology, legal, historical, and educational textbooks from various publishers.
Susan holds a Master of Arts degree in adult education from Norwich University in Vermont, a Bachelor of Science degree in nursing from the Pennsylvania State University, and state licensure as an RN. She is a member of and has national certification from the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA). She is also a member of the American Society for Indexing (ASI).
