Documenting 'what nurses do'--moving beyond coding and classification.

A variety of strategies for knowledge representation have been applied to the texts from a number of medical domains. Many of the techniques rely on the well-defined ways in which medical terms are used within a given domain, a phenomenon referred to as 'sublanguage.' Because much of nursing documentation involves the use of 'everyday' language, the viable application of sublanguage-based approaches to knowledge representation of nursing documentation is not a forgone conclusion. We propose an approach utilizing semantic markup of nursing notes as a strategy for determining whether the documentation of 'what nurses do' is a sublanguage Results of an initial feasibility study utilizing the approach are presented.