The Use of NANDA-I, NIC & NOC
(
NANDA International,, 2005)
The inclusion of
NANDA-I nursing diagnoses in conjunction with the Nursing Intervention Classification (McCloskey and Bulechek, 2004) and the Nursing Outcome Classification (Moorhead et al., 2004)in the EHR provides a comprehensive means for capturing the unique contribution of nursing in a consistent and quantifiable format. This consistency can provide the following benefits:
- Facilitate communication efforts of the healthcare team. These nursing terms, along with uniform medication and medical terms, will provide continuity of care within nursing units and across nursing settings (Figoski and Downey, 2006).
- A language that links nursing concepts for the nursing process within the EHR and facilitates the eventual data exchange of nursing process concepts.
- A means of describing the knowledge and skills essential to nursing practice (Lunney, 2006).
- A common method to allow nurse executives and administrators to collect and analyze nursing-specific data that will provide evidence of the effects and contributions that nursing care provides, as well as the ability to cost out nursing services to third party payers (Jerant et al., 2001).
- A common means to capture data on patient outcomes that will assist design and build new knowledge to support evidence-based practice (Lavin et al., 2004).
- A mechanism to facilitate health ministry and legislative debate with policy development (Lavin et al., 2004).
- A common language in the education process to teach clinical decision-making to nursing students (Garcia et al., 2006; Gloskey et al., 2006; Gordon, 2006; Johnson, 2006).
- Information to advance the science of nursing care.
- In order for the EHR to truly reflect the total care provided by healthcare professionals, it must include nursing data to reflect the nursing process (von Krogh et al., 2005).
Standardized nursing terminologies such as
NANDA-I,
NIC, and
NOC provide the means of collecting nursing data that are systematically analyzed within and across healthcare organizations. Furthermore,
these data are essential to provide the foundation for any cost/benefit analysis for nursing practice.