Coding
Nursing November 22, 2015 -- Here is another reflection following the American Medical Informatics Association's 2015 meeting (AMIA) that ended today. It regards data coding standards for nursing and is woefully neglected, even here at AMIA. The topic is important for nursing because without a good coding scheme, we cannot capture data about what we do. Without that data, we cannot make the important case for the value that we create for healthcare. As I have discussed here, there are several encoding schemes for nursing data. The best one for the purposes of nursing and data processing is Virgina Saba's Clinical Care Classification System but alas it hasn't received the wide uptake it deserves. (I have blogged briefly about her.) Dr. Saba herself attended the conference (we lunched) and -- as one of the grand dames of nursing informatics -- presented the Virginia K. Saba Informatics Award. At AMIA, the only nursing coding scheme I saw discussed was International Classification for Nursing Practice (ICNP), an international standard and nursing-centered but not as well suited for computerization. Perhaps this is an area for discussion at a future AMIA. |
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Dan Keller's Nursing, Health Policy & Healthcare Technology Blog
Nursing Informatics · Clinical Perspectives · Healthcare Systems
"The United States alone [among wealthy countries] treats health care as a commodity to be distributed according to the ability to pay rather than a social service to be distributed according to medical need." — JAMA (2003), 290, 798