Nursing Care Value-Based Financial Models

Nursing care makes up one of the largest expenditures in the health care system, yet patient-level nursing intensity and costs are essentially unknown. Prior efforts to define nursing care value have been stymied by a lack of available data; however, emerging information from electronic health records provide an opportunity to measure nursing care in ways that have not been possible. New metrics using these data will allow improved measurement of cost, quality, and intensity at the level of each nurse and patient across many different settings which can be used to inform operational and clinical decision making. In this article, the initial results and recommendations of an expert panel tasked with defining and measuring nursing care value as part of a larger effort to address evolving issues related to big data and nursing knowledge development are described.