A computer program to support patient assessment and clinical decision-making in nursing education

This article reports on the development of a computer program for the recording of patient assessments performed by graduate nursing students. This program is part of a larger effort called Computer-Aided Research in Nursing (CARIN) that will also be used for data collection and retrieval. This article describes two phases of the current project. Other nursing diagnosis programs in existence are briefly reviewed, and formulation of the two initial steps of the nursing process, assessment and nursing diagnosis, are described.