Using Formal Knowledge to Support Episodic Evidence-Based Nursing Care

Applying evidence-based medicine prevents medical errors highlighting the need for applying Clinical Guidelines (CGs) to improve patient care by nurses. However, nurses often face challenges in utilizing CGs due to patient-specific needs. Developing a Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) can provide real-time context-sensitive CG-based recommendations. Therefore, there is a need to acquire and represent CGs in a machine-applicable manner. Also, there is a need to be able to provide recommendations episodically, only when requested, and not continuously, and to assess previous partial performance of evidence-based actions on a continuous scale. This study evaluated the feasibility of acquiring and representing major nursing CGs, in a machine-applicable manner for episodic use. Using data from an Israeli geriatric center, the results suggest that an episodic CDSS effectively supports the application of formalized nursing knowledge.