Challenge Areas Major Tasks
Education Develop a standardized curriculum for nursing informatics faculty and students.
Foster advancements in certification, credentialing and accreditation systems within nursing informatics programs.
Practice Transform nursing documentation by identifying the information structures and infrastructures needed within EHRs and clinical data repositories (CDRs) to enable the storage, aggregation and querying of nursing data at an organizational level.
Develop strategies to measure the value of nursing by developing a national consensus model and identifying new business intelligence/analytic tools.
Policies/Incentives Advance the National Database of Nursing Quality Indicators (NDNQIs) to promote HIT policy.
Coordinate efforts to engage nurses in HIT policy. Build an infrastructure for the collection and dissemination of standardized
workforce data.
Research Develop and disseminate LOINC/SNOMED CT framework for integration into EHRs.
Promote harmonization and standardization of nursing data and models. Advancing/engaging nurse research and the science of big data.
2015. The Healthcare Information and Management System Society (HIMSS) CNO-CNIO Vendor Roundtable forms the Big Data Principles Workgroup, which is tasked with developing a white paper to identify big data principles, barriers and challenges; develop a framework for requirements; identify differences in the context of nursing outcomes; address the impact of HIT system versions/configurations; analyze the variation in quality measures; and discuss implementation challenges. The resulting white paper on the “Guiding Principles for Big Data in Nursing” identifies 10 recommendations within three major areas of Promoting Standards and Interoperability, Advancing Quality eMeasures and Leveraging Nursing Informatics Experts. The recommendations that are focused on Promoting Standards and interoperability are the most relevant to the topic of SNTs, and include the following:
Promote the use of standardized and accepted terminologies to address documentation needs of entire care teams regardless of setting. This should include a plan for implementing an ANA- recognized nursing terminology mapped to a national standard, i.e. SNOMED CT or LOINC.
Recommend consistent use of assessment scales standardized through an international consensus body.
The ANA-recognizes nursing terminologies should be updated consistently and made available to international standards organizations for translation and complete, comprehensive mapping.
Identifying Challenges and Opportunities within Standard Nursing Terminologies 33
Minimize the use of free text documentation and use discrete data elements to enable decision suppport, research, analytics and knowledge generation.
2015. The ANA publishes a position statement reaffirming its support for the use of recognized terminologies supporting nursing practice within the EHR and other health information technology solutions.
2016. ONC assigns a landscape assessment to understand better the current status and associated challenges with the current 12ANA-recognized terms.
Identifying Challenges and Opportunities within Standard Nursing Terminologies 34
Appendix B: Pre-Determined Landscape Assessment Questionnaire
Area of Analysis Questions