Building nursing statements based on ICNP

Abstract

Correct and professional use of the nursing termonology is important to assure quality information in the nursing practice. The International Classification for Nursing Practice(ICNP) is a unified language system which includes thousands of terms which can be used by nurses when writing electronic health records(EHR). Nurses usually have a specific domain their work relates to and therefore only a limited amount of terms in the ICNP is used. Creating domain specific catalogues with subsets of the ICNP terms and also including common nursing statements in these domains, can help make the teaching and use, more efficient. To make the process of making catalogues easier, a prototype application should be developed with the help of the OWL expressed ontology of ICNP. By extending the ICNP ontology and using the power of Semantic Web for storing catalog data, it will be ready for future research and use.