Staffing based on evidence: can health information technology make it possible?

Health care leaders must balance nurse staffing between financial viability and quality of care. The potential to use health information technology as a tool to assess effective nurse staffing decisions is a rather new phenomena explored by some of the thought leaders in nursing informatics. This preliminary pilot study is one of a few attempts at engineering health IT to identify factors that lead to a meaningful model for predicting nurse intensity. The Pilot Study provided richness to the design of a new model Clinical Demand Index to calculate nurse intensity by: (a) identifying the factors of how nurses spend their time; (b) using health IT data mining techniques to determine data types for abstraction; and (c) identifying variables that are most closely related to nursing intensity of how nurses spend their time. The CDI Model and health IT can make staffing based on evidence a reality and thus play an important role in demonstrating that clinical data from the electronic health record can be abstracted real time and used to objectively calculate nurse intensity and continue to engineer a learning health system.