The nursing intervention lexicon and taxonomy: implications for representing nursing care data in automated patient records.

The article discusses how the Nursing Intervention Lexicon and Taxonomy (NILT) is being used to describe patterns of care for patients receiving home care nursing. These patterns of care include intensity (frequency of interventions), focus of care (NILT category or categories with the highest percentage of interventions), and comprehensiveness of care (number of NILT intervention categories reflected). Thus with a means for quantifying care in holistic ways, nurses can now ask important questions about clinical care and its outcomes using empirical nursing data about care (i.e., categorized nursing intervention statements). Understanding how these data are expressed using nurses' natural language terms, and being able to categorize these interventions reliably, represent essential preliminary work for describing and defining data for inclusion in the automated record.