Patient Care Data Set
The Patient Care Data Set (PCDS) was developed to address the need for a comprehensive terminology for the acute care setting. The PCDS was not developed as a classification system, but as a data dictionary of elements to be included in and abstracted from clinical information systems (Ozbolt, 1997). Earlier versions of the PCDS contained pre-coordinated phrases to describe clinical practice. Ozbolt’s work has led to parsing the pre-coordinated terms into atomic elements that can be coded and combined to describe clinical activities. The PCDS may be described as multiaxial and combinatorial. Henry and Mead (1997) describe a combinatorial vocabulary as “one in which atomic terms may be combined to represent more complex concepts rather than a simple term- matching classification system” (p. 226).