Evaluating the appropriateness of a nurse expert system's patient assessment

The Urological Nursing Information System (UNIS) is an expert-system prototype designed to help nurses perform patient assessments on elderly nursing home residents known to be incontinent of urine. A study was conducted to evaluate the appropriateness of the patient-assessment parameters stored in the knowledge base of UNIS. These parameters were stored as objects--a kind of template for holding related clusters of data, facts, rules, hypotheses, or any knowledge in a single conceptual unit. Each object was rated for its appropriateness by 14 nurse experts. Resulting scores ranged from +14 to -14. The effect of the nurse experts' educational backgrounds and work settings on their ratings were also analyzed. The results indicated that 95.6% of the objects received favorable ratings from the nurse experts. Educational background was not a significant factor chi 2 = 5.2, but work settings did have a significant affect chi 2 = 21.07, p = 0.01.