Hsia, Lin, Wu, & Tsai
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The Nursing Process
In 1980, The American Nurses’ Association defined nursing as “The diagnosis and treatment of
human responses to actual or potential health problems.” The practices (steps) of the nursing
process including assessment, diagnosis, plan, implementation, and evaluation are cyclic, overlapping
and interrelated.
• Step 1, assessment, is the most critical step and answers the questions: “What is happening
(i.e., actual problem)?”, or “What could happen (i.e., potential problem)?” This step
involves collecting, organizing, and analyzing information/data about the patient. That is
two parts: data collection and data analysis. In general, the data collection is a holistic
approach and the methods of data collection can be observation, interview, and examination.
The data types include subjective and objective data. The former can be “symptoms”
that the patient describes; e.g. “I can’t do anything for myself.” The later can be
“signs” that can be observed, measured, and verified; e.g., swollen joints.
• Step 2, diagnosis, is a statement that describes a specific human response to an actual or
potential health problem that requires nursing intervention.
• Step 3, plan, provides consistent, continuous care that will meet the patient’s unique
needs, includes patient goals and nursing orders. The patient goals are directly related to
the patient’s problem as stated in the diagnosis, which describe the desired result of nursing
care and the nursing order describes what the nurse will do to help the patient achieve
the goals.
• Step 4, implementation, involves applying the skills needed to implement the nursing order.
The major tasks include reassessing the patient, validating that the care plan is accurate,
carrying out nurses’ orders, documenting on patient’s chart and so forth.
• Step 5, evaluation, compare the patient’s current status with the stated patient goals and
has three different operations or purposes: evaluation of the quality of the written care
plan, evaluation of the client’s progress, and evaluation of the status/currency of the care
plan.
Nursing practices are increasingly being encoded in the form of nursing guidelines and protocols
that drive health care service delivery. Nurses especially use the health care knowledge combined
with their know-how and experience to deliver health care services. Today, this work can be enhanced
by enabling technologies such as a KMS.
Conceptual Framework for Designing Nursing KMS
Nursing process involves several complex and knowledge-intensive practices that highly depend
on nursing professional know-how and experience. Thus, whether nurses can utilize and manage
their knowledge in nursing process effectively is vital to the quality of care. Technologies currently
available allow for the development of e-health systems that can affect the entire professional
experience for nurses. For instance, nurses can now electronically link to several or all information
systems that influence their practice. These systems include electronic health records,
medical knowledge bases, prescription ordering, and clinical decision support systems. The availability
of theses e-health applications has introduced an opportunity for systems designers to develop
integrated KMSs that can support the full spectrum of knowledge needs in nursing process.
In fact, the use of knowledge-based IT to facilitate the practice of health care promises to substantially
improve health care quality (Jadad, Haynes, Hunt, & Browman, 2000).
A nursing KMS can be represented by a nursing service delivery model as well as the enabling IT
to provide appropriate support for each KM activity in the nursing process. Given the wide array
of information sources that can be integrated and accessible from the e-health environment,