Where is Nursing in the Electronic Health Care Record?

The authors explore the possibilities for documenting professional nursing practice in an electronic health record. Recognizing that there are a variety of approaches to electronic documentation, the intent of this discussion is to generate a general rather than a particular approach to this issue. Nurses themselves must determine the ways in which professional nursing care will be captured in the electronic systems used in their facilities. Questions that arise from nursing include: How can nurses balance generalized care and protocol management with the need for documentation of each individual's nursing needs and particular experiences? How can the goals of nursing care be incorporated into the record? How can nursing actions/interventions be clearly communicated to all members of the health care team? In what ways can an electronic record document collaboration with the client to determine individualized outcomes of care and treatment? In considering these questions a number of issues arise: the selection of standardized languages to be used in the records, the title of the record, the tension between coding and text, the accessibility and transferability of the record, the ability to retrieve data on nursing outcomes through data mining techniques, ownership of the record, and privacy/security of the information stored. Although the paper will make no attempt to answer these questions it will draw on relevant journal articles to provide a context for this pivotal change in that way we account for health care practice.