Assessing the relation of the coded nursing care and nursing intensity data: Towards the exploitation of clinical data for administrative use and the design of nursing workload.

Patient-care data from the electronic health record systems are increasingly in demand for re-use in administration and resource planning. Nursing documentation with coded concepts is expected to produce more reliable data, fulfilling better requirements for re-use. The aim was to ascertain what kind of relation exist between coded nursing diagnoses, nursing interventions, and nursing intensity and to discuss the possibilities for re-using nursing data for workload design. We analysed the retrospective nursing records of 794 patients documented by the Finnish Care Classification and nursing intensity data assessed by the Oulu Patient Classification over a 15-day period in nine inpatient units at a university hospital. Using the generalised linear mixed model, the clear relationship between the number of coded nursing notes and nursing intensity levels were ascertained. The number of coded nursing notes increases when the nursing intensity increases. The outcomes construct a good basis for continuing elaboration of electronic health record data re-use.