Making the procedure manual come alive: A prototype relational database and dynamic website model for the management of nursing information.

The nursing procedural manual is an essential resource for clinical practice, yet insuring its currency and availability at the point of care remains an unresolved information management challenge for nurses. While standard HTML-based web pages offer significant advantage over paper compilations, employing emerging computer science tools offers even greater promise. This paper reports on the creation of a prototypical dynamic web-based nursing procedure manual driven by a relational database. We created a relational database in MySQL to manage, store, and link the procedure information, and developed PHP files to guide content retrieval, content management, and display on demand in browser-viewable format. This database driven dynamic website model is an important innovation to meet the challenge of content management and dissemination of nursing information.