Preliminary analysis for the development of a PDA-based decision support system for the screening and management of obesity.

This preliminary study toward the development of a Mobile Decision Support System for Advanced Practice Nursing (MODS-APN) for the management of obesity compared APN students' current electronic clinical log (CL-APN) documentation to an obesity clinical practice guideline (CPG) and examined the extent to which concepts related to the screening and management of obesity could be represented with standardized terminologies. The data that were documented by APN students with the CL-APN were retrieved using the Structured Query Language (SQL) and were compared to the CPG using a scoring tool developed for this study. Only 1.4 % of the encounters had obesity as an assessment diagnosis and about 40 % of those encounters did not have any plans of care related to the CPG's main treatment recommendations. Fifty-six concepts related to the screening and management of obesity were extracted from the CPG and were mapped to 36 terms using standardized terminologies.