Care planning as a strategy to manage variation in practice: from care plan to integrated person-based record.

This article begins with a summary of the trend toward a person-based health record, and the need to integrate data from a variety of sources to achieve this. A project is described that demonstrated problems with the structure of nursing care plans. These problems affected the ability to integrate care plan data into a clinical database capable of analysis to link control of process with clinical outcome. A second project is described that focused on the development of data sets holding higher-level descriptions suitable for the maintenance of a person-based record, but at a summarized level and with no clinical detail. Finally, a prototype care planning system is described that, while maintaining the data required by the Nursing Process, was more flexibly structured to support analysis and hierarchical levels of description.