Electronic dissemination media for promoting ICNP in CEE countries

The TeleNurse ID-ENTITY Inco-Copernicus project, co-ordinated by Randi A. Mortensen, director of the Danish Institute for Health and Nursing Research, is offering to the health informatics community of CEE countries a frame and an opportunity to determine nurses to become active actors in the development of the nursing language and terminology and to promote nursing informatics. This is of great importance, for these countries do not have yet a standard for the electronic patient record and the standard that will be proposed has to incorporate a nursing minimum data set. The ICNP1(International Classification of Nursing Practices) classification of nursing phenomena and interventions is a polyhierarchical, multi-axial classification system, allowing different concepts in nursing practice and from different classification systems, to be expressed as combinations of ICNP concepts, located on different axis. The features of ICNP are making it a sound candidate for a standard computerised nursing language. As part of the general strategy for promoting and disseminating ICNP in CEEC, CCSSDM has developed an electronic environment based on Internet and WWW facilities. The main composant and characteristics of this electronic dissemination environment are described in this paper.