Standardized nursing classification systems: necessary, but not sufficient, for representing what nurses do.

The American Nurses Association Steering Committee on Databases to Support Nursing Practice has recognized three standardized nursing intervention classification systems. Because each of these classifications systems focuses on encoding informational abstractions of nursing actions, rather than providing a controlled vocabulary and compositional grammar from which informational concepts and abstractions can be constructed, the systems are necessary, but not sufficient, for representing what nurses do. In particular, computer based patient record systems focused on process understanding and process improvement will require atomic-level representations of nursing actions suitable for transformation into a variety of information abstractions, including, but not limited to, the abstractions contained in the three existing classification systems.