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. 2015 Jun 24;6(2):418-28.
doi: 10.4338/ACI-2015-04-RA-0037. eCollection 2015.

A Nursing Intelligence System to Support Secondary Use of Nursing Routine Data

W O Hackl  1 , F Rauchegger  2 , E Ammenwerth  1
Affiliations

A Nursing Intelligence System to Support Secondary Use of Nursing Routine Data

W O Hackl et al. Appl Clin Inform. .

Abstract

Background: Nursing care is facing exponential growth of information from nursing documentation. This amount of electronically available data collected routinely opens up new opportunities for secondary use.

Objectives: To present a case study of a nursing intelligence system for reusing routinely collected nursing documentation data for multiple purposes, including quality management of nursing care.

Methods: The SPIRIT framework for systematically planning the reuse of clinical routine data was leveraged to design a nursing intelligence system which then was implemented using open source tools in a large university hospital group following the spiral model of software engineering.

Results: The nursing intelligence system is in routine use now and updated regularly, and includes over 40 million data sets. It allows the outcome and quality analysis of data related to the nursing process.

Conclusions: Following a systematic approach for planning and designing a solution for reusing routine care data appeared to be successful. The resulting nursing intelligence system is useful in practice now, but remains malleable for future changes.

Keywords: Medical informatics; data integration; data mining; databases; nursing informatics.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest in the research.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Overview of the architecture of the nursing intelligence system consisting of two layers. The first layer is dedicated to data integration and management and holds the data extraction, transformation, and loading routines as well as the integrated data repository, a so-called nursing data mart. The second layer, dedicated to data analysis, provides a web-based analysis platform with predefined, adaptable reports for standard analyses. For special analyses and advanced analysis techniques, separate subsets from the nursing data mart can be obtained by individual queries.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Overview of the groups of different analysis questions, of the selection and filter criteria and of the stratification parameters available in the nursing intelligence system.
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Data model of the nursing intelligence system with the relations „Patient” and „Stay”. Redundancies within the data model are intended; due to performance issues, normalization was not applied (only major tables and attributes are shown).
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
Development of the amount of data (physical patients, admissions, nursing diagnoses including pathways, evaluations of nursing goals, orders and outcomes) in the nursing intelligence system since 11/2009 (logarithmic scale).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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