Knowledge-based evaluation of nursing care practice

Providing people with a complete and responsive healthcare solution requires a multi-tiered health service delivery system. One aspect in the healthcare hierarchy is the need for care provided by nurses. Nursing care and observation provide the basis for nurses to communicate their practice with others in the healthcare system. It is necessary to capture and manage knowledge of nursing care to improve the quality nursing practice. This paper proposes a novel knowledge-based decision support system for nurses to capture and manage nursing practice, and further, to monitor nursing care quality, as well as to test aspects of an electronic health record for recording and reporting nursing practice. As part of ongoing collaborative research of the nursing school and the department of computer science, a prototype toolset was developed to capture and manage nursing practice in order to improve the quality of care. A case study is presented to demonstrate the toolset used by nurses in a local hospital environment.