Automatic search of nursing diagnoses

Abstract

Nursing documentation is all the information that nurses register regarding the clinical assessment and care of a patient. Currently, these records are manually written in a narrative style; consequently, their quality and completeness largely depends on the nurse's expertise. This paper presents an algorithm based on standardized nursing language that searches and sorts nursing diagnoses by its relevance through a ranking. Diagnoses identification is performed by searching and matching patterns among a set of patient needs or symptoms and the international standard of nursing diagnoses NANDA. Three sorting methods were evaluated using 6 utility cases. The results suggest that TF-IDF (83.43% accuracy) and assignment of weights by hit (80.73% accuracy) are the two best alternatives to implement the ranking of diagnoses. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.