Information model for learning nursing terminology.

Standardized terminologies are introduced in healthcare with the intention of improving information quality, which is important for enhancing the quality of healthcare itself. The International Classification for Nursing Practice (ICNP®) is a unified language system that presents an ontology for nursing terminology; it is meant for documentation of nursing diagnoses, nursing interventions and patient outcomes. This paper presents an information model and an application for teaching nursing students how to use ICNP to assist in the planning of nursing care. The model is an integration of ICNP and our catalog ontology, patient journal ontology, and ontology defining task sets. The application for learning nursing terminology offers descriptions of patient situations and then prompts the student to supply nursing statements for diagnoses, goals and interventions. The nursing statements may be selected from catalogues containing premade solutions based on ICNP, or they may be constructed directly by selecting terms from ICNP.