DATA STANDARDS

Health Data Standards

Health Data Standards

The traces of initial systems that were designed to gather minimum and uniform data related to health issues are found over a century ago by Florence Nightingale (Verney 1970). The nurses are needed to take advantage of the health data using the power of memory because the condition of their patients can be tracked back through non-subjective observation (Nightingale 1859). She also provided a list of those definitions and forms that might be useful in collecting the data to be used as hospital statistics (Nightingale 1863). The needs that were realized a century ago are still unchanged. The settings of diversified care delivery and the support of patient care delivery are not possible without management and processing of nursing knowledge, information, and data (Graves and Corcoran, 1989). The patient's safety, client outcomes, and access to information are essentially linked. Succinct and apt description provided by Lang states that it is not possible to teach, finance, control or to put something into public policy until it is not named (Clark and Lang, 1992). In order to improve patient outcomes, the support required by nurse's contribution depends on nurses' practice arm that is the access to information. Evidence based nursing practice is essentially founded on outcomes research. Patient's safety is enhanced and motivated by evidence based practice.

Nursing practice data captures its consideration through a variety of interlinked concepts. In following figure, Hannah et al (2006) provided a result of feedback loop through derivation of reference terminology models, minimum data set, nursing terminology, nursing classification and nursing practice.

Relationship between nursing practice and reference terminology model, minimum data sets, terminology and classification.

Data Standards Organizations

It is almost impossible to share the content of patient's health records between health care professionals as the records are in paper or electronic from located in ...