Measuring Nursing Care Value.

The value of nursing care as well as the contribution of individual nurses to clinical outcomes has been difficult to measure and evaluate. Existing health care financial models hide the contribution of nurses; therefore, the link between the cost and quality o nursing care is unknown. New data and methods are needed to articulate the added value of nurses to patient care. The final results and recommendations of an expert workgroup tasked with defining and measuring nursing care value, including a data model to allow extraction of key information from electronic health records to measure nursing care value, are described. A set of new analytic metrics are proposed.