Nursing intervention intensity and focus: indicators of process for outcomes studies.

Outcomes research has become increasingly important in the current health care environment and for informatics research efforts. Recent efforts in automating clinical data for use in outcomes studies has focused attention on the need to represent the processes of care in the classic structure-process-outcome models of care. This paper reports on use of the Nursing Intervention Lexicon and Taxonomy for classifying interventions to characterize two process of care variables: intervention intensity and intervention focus. Study results demonstrate that these variables are descriptive and provide promise for describing processes of nursing care for describing clinical care.