A brief history of nursing informatics

Vocabulary flashcards covering key terms, people, organizations, and standards from the history and development of nursing informatics.

Nursing informatics

The interdisciplinary field integrating nursing science, information science, and computer science to manage and process nursing data, information, and knowledge to support nursing practice, education, research, and administration.

Florence Nightingale

Pioneer who linked standardized clinical records to care improvement, advocated data analysis, and planted seeds of health services research, evidence‑based practice, and nursing informatics.

Nursing Minimum Data Set (NMDS)

A minimum set of standardized data elements collected on every patient to support research on costs and effectiveness; four uniquely nursing elements include nursing diagnosis, nursing intervention, nursing outcome, and intensity of nursing care.

Omaha System

Standardized data elements and forms for recording home care data to improve care and meet reporting requirements; an early nursing data language.

NANDA

North American Nursing Diagnosis Association; organization that standardizes nursing diagnoses.

NIC

Nursing Interventions Classification; a taxonomy describing what nurses do (nursing interventions).

NOC

Nursing Outcomes Classification; standardized outcomes used to measure the effects of nursing care.

Omaha System → CCC

The Omaha System informed the development of subsequent, broader nursing classifications; its data elements helped shape later standardized terminology.

HHCC

Home Health Care Classification; language to record nursing diagnoses and interventions in home care, later generalized as the Clinical Care Classification (CCC) system.

CCC

Clinical Care Classification System; a language for documenting nursing care and facilitating data collection across settings.

ICNP

International Classification of Nursing Practice; global, interoperable terminology for nursing.

SNOMED CT

Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine—Clinical Terms; comprehensive clinical terminology now used internationally for semantic interoperability.

UMLS

Unified Medical Language System; meta-thesaurus that links multiple medical vocabularies to enable semantic interoperability.

TRIMIS

Tri-Service Medical Information System; DoD medical information system development in the 1970s–80s.

IMIA

International Medical Informatics Association; organization promoting international collaboration in medical informatics.

SCAMC

Symposium on Computer Applications in Medical Care; early national conference where nursing informatics papers were presented.

ANA CNPII

American Nurses Association Database Steering Committee on Databases to Support Clinical Nursing Practice; later renamed CNPII, promoting nursing data standards.

NCNIP

National Commission on Nursing Implementation Project; produced Next Generation Nursing Information Systems: Essential Characteristics for Professional Practice (1993).

Graves & Corcoran (1989)

Defined nursing informatics as a scientific discipline uniting nursing science, information science, and computer science to manage and process nursing data, information, and knowledge.

Nursing terminology standardization (1990s)

Efforts to create computable, interoperable nursing languages (e.g., NANDA, NIC, NOC, Omaha System) to enable data analysis and interoperability.

Nursing Terminology Summit (1999)

Invitational conferences to develop concept‑oriented reference terminology models for nursing and map them to UMLS, leading toward international standardization (ISO TC 215).

ISO-TC 215

International Organization for Standardization Technical Committee 215, responsible for health informatics standards, including terminology models for nursing.

ISO 18104 (2003)

ISO standard for nursing language-terminology models to support computability and interoperability.

AHIC

American Health Information Community; national group overseeing the development of a national health information infrastructure and interoperability standards.

HITSP

Health Information Technology Standards Panel; reviews and recommends standards for interoperable health information transactions.

CCHIT

Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology; certifies health IT products for interoperability and safety.

HL7

Health Level Seven; organization and standard for exchanging clinical and administrative data between healthcare information systems.

LOINC

Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes; standard for laboratory and clinical observations.

TIGER

Technology Informatics Guiding Educational Reform; initiative to reform nursing education with informatics competencies and leadership.

ANI

Alliance for Nursing Informatics; coalition of nursing organizations to unite informatics efforts and policy in healthcare.

AMIA NI-WG

American Medical Informatics Association, Nursing Informatics Working Group; pivotal group for nurses in informatics and leadership within AMIA.

Staggers & Mills (1994)

Pioneering study on nurse–computer interaction and staff performance outcomes in nursing informatics.

Staggers, Gassert, Curran (2002)

Delphi study to identify informatics competencies for nurses across four levels of practice.

Patricia Brennan – Health@Home

Pioneering work in consumer health informatics, showing how computer-based education and support can benefit patients and caregivers at home.

Nightingale’s three intertwined health sciences

Health services research, evidence‑based practice, and nursing informatics as interconnected roots of modern nursing informatics.