Whether aggregated electronic health data improve clinical care and health services research will finally be testable when a comprehensive electronic medical record system gets here. But how to capture reality in words that the ambiguity-challenged computer will understand? Natural language processing of clinical records is not ready, and so we struggle to make do with controlled vocabularies.#N##N#Nursing vocabularies face some particularly difficult hurdles. In defining nursing as “the diagnosis and treatment of human responses to actual or potential health problems,”1 the American Nursing Association staked out an important professional area for which operational definitions are not easily formed, and whose terminology is neither standardized nor readily converted to use by computers.#N##N#Nursing recognizes the challenge. A minimal nursing data set has been proposed,2 and a number …
['Milton Corn']
Funding for Nursing Vocabularies