The evolution of a clinical database: from local to standardized clinical languages.

For more than twenty years, the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics Nursing Informatics (UIHC NI) has been developing a clinical database to support patient care planning and documentation in the INFORMM NIS (Information Network for Online Retrieval & Medical Management Nursing Information System). Beginning in 1992, the database content was revised to standardize orders and to incorporate the Standardized Nursing Languages (SNLs) of the North American Nursing Diagnosis Association (NANDA), Nursing Diagnosis Extension Classification (NDEC), Nursing Interventions Classification (NIC), and Nursing Outcomes Classification (NOC). This paper reports the results of the database revision as well as recent usage data, new user selection methods for clinical content, and the advantages of a database utilizing SNLs.