Terminology use in electronic health records: basic principles.

Electronic health records (EHRs) are a cost-saving and environmentally friendly means for documenting patient care and improving patient safety, quality, and evidence-based practice. Standardized clinical classification systems and terminologies are essential ingredients of the EHR. Their selection must be driven by a clear understanding of requirements for their use and application. This article describes the principle uses of clinical information and motives for consistency in practice, and provides a distinction between classification systems and reference terminologies for clinical settings.

Structured terminologies in clinical information systems: implementation through collaboration.

The structure and content of the dialog with a clinical end-user is a critical aspect of clinical information system use, data capture and retrieval, and efficient and effective health care. This dialog is driven ultimately by embedded structures and processes that: a) provide functional models of clinical expression in support of professional practice, and b) determine how structured terminologies ought to populate these models. Based on diverse practical experience, this study identifies challenges to implementing structured clinical terminologies, categorizing them by both stakeholder group and application area. Collaboration across all stakeholders and across a wide range of application areas is identified as a key ingredient to successful terminology implementation and use.

Translation and integration of CCC nursing diagnoses into ICNP.

The purpose of this study was to translate and integrate nursing diagnosis concepts from the Clinical Care Classification (CCC) System Version 2.0 to DiagnosticPhenomenon or nursing diagnostic statements in the International Classification for Nursing Practice (ICNP) Version 1.0. Source concepts for CCC were mapped by the project team, where possible, to pre-coordinated ICNP terms. The manual decomposition of source concepts according to the ICNP 7-Axis Model served to validate the mappings. A total of 62% of the CCC Nursing Diagnoses were a pre-coordinated match to an ICNP concept, 35% were a post-coordinated match and only 3% had no match. During the mapping process, missing CCC concepts were submitted to the ICNP Programme, with a recommendation for inclusion in future releases.

Modeling nursing interventions in the act class of HL7 RIM Version 3.

The proposed Health Level 7 Reference Information Model (HL7 RIM) Version 3 is the foundation for expressing data to be communicated across health care information systems. The general objective of this analysis was to examine whether the RIM supports the expression of nursing interventions, considering both terminological and structural perspectives. The Nursing Terminology Summit Interventions Group focused on patient education about breast cancer, an intervention that differs sufficiently from other medical processes already considered by HL7 and represents issues surrounding both definition and execution of nursing process. Relevant actors, actions, and action relationships were culled from use cases and modeled into the proposed RIM structure and attributes by using modified instance diagrams. This method was effective and reproducible, and the RIM proved to be an adequate model for supporting breast cancer education. Additional interventions must be studied to fully assess the adequacy of the model to support all aspects of nursing process and terminology.