ICNP Catalogues for Supporting Nursing Content in Electronic Health Records

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to describe sets of nursing concepts including, for example, nursing diagnoses and interventions, which are knowledge-based and clinically relevant to support nursing practice. Health information systems using the International Classification for Nursing Practice (ICNP®) provide a platform for standardized nursing documentation for patients' health care, clinical decision support, and repositories for re-use of clinical data for quality evaluation, research, management decisions and policy development. Clinically relevant sets of ICNP concepts can facilitate implementation of health information systems for nursing. Descriptive analysis was used to examine the types of, and relationships among, existing nursing content sets. Findings included the need for various types of content sets, as represented in ICNP catalogues, for nursing documentation. Five types of ICNP Catalogues included Care Plans, Order Sets, Clinical Templates, Nursing Minimum Data Sets, and Terminology Subsets.