Reference terminology for therapeutic goals: a new approach

Participants at the Nursing Terminology Summit Conference 2002 developed proposed terminology models and information models for findings, goals, and outcomes and described the relationships among these concepts. At Vanderbilt University the author has dissected items in a controlled vocabulary of goals in accordance with the terminology model for findings. The concept-based dissections are linked to pre-coordinated phrases in a relational database, providing unambiguous definitions of clinical expressions and enabling concept-oriented searching of the terms database and of the goal achievement database.