ANA standards for nursing data sets in information systems

The American Nurses Association has established the Nursing Information and Data Set Evaluation Center. The purpose of this Center is to develop and disseminate standards pertaining to information systems that support the documentation of nursing practice, and to evaluate voluntarily submitted information systems against these standards. The need for an evaluation center arises out of a long history of calls for standards pertaining to nursing data and information systems. These calls have come from the Secretary of Health and Human Services Commission on Nursing, the National Commission on Nursing Implementation Project, and a joint Task Force appointed by the Congress of Nursing Practice Steering Committee on Databases to Support Clinical Nursing Practice and the Congress of Nursing Practice Committee on Nursing Practice Standards and Guidelines. Standards have been developed to evaluate the completeness, accuracy and appropriateness of four dimensions of nursing data sets and the systems that contain them: (1) nomenclature, (2) clinical content, (3) clinical data repository, and (4) general system characteristics.