Towards a standardized representation to support data reuse: representing the ICNP semantics using the HL7 RIM.

Representing nursing assessment data in a reusable manner is important as it provides a basis for decision making in patient care. In a previous study, we have extended the ICNP concept model to support representation of nursing assessment data. In this study, we evaluated its potential to support electronic documentation of nursing assessment data and HL7 conformant message generation by mapping it to the HL7 RIM. The semantics represented by the ICNP were completely related to the RIM implying that the ICNP is a good candidate terminology to encode the data with in an electronic documentation system. A few differences between the two models in representing the same semantics suggests that there is value to supporting broad ranges of semantic relations in the ICNP.