Developing an outcomes infrastructure for nursing. The Outcomes Taskforce

Area of Science:

• Healthcare Management
• Nursing Research
• Health Informatics

Background:

• Evaluating patient care sensitive to nursing interventions is crucial.
• Existing administrative measures may not fully capture nursing's impact.
• A comprehensive evaluation framework is needed.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and describe an infrastructure for evaluating patient care sensitive to nursing interventions.
• To incorporate patient functional status, knowledge, engagement, and psychosocial well-being into care evaluation.
• To establish the reliability and validity of data elements within this infrastructure.

Main Methods:

• Developing a database infrastructure within a health maintenance organization.
• Including traditional administrative measures alongside patient-centered clinical data.
• Implementing algorithms for missing data and establishing reliability and validity of data elements.
• Conducting a study to confirm the content validity of clinical data elements.

Main Results:

• Structures for monitoring and supporting data reliability and validity are in place.
• Algorithm elements have been created to manage missing data.
• The model for the first generation of practice reports has been developed.
• Content validity of clinical data elements has been established through a study.

Conclusions:

• The developed infrastructure provides a robust framework for evaluating nursing's impact on patient care.
• Incorporating patient-reported outcomes enhances the sensitivity of care evaluation.
• The study confirms the validity of clinical data elements for this purpose.