NOW FOR AN ORIGINAL PAPER ASSIGNMENT:Case Study: The Cerner System

Vendors may also have their software packages evaluated by NIDSEC. The evaluation is a type of quality control on the vendor. An application packet must be purchased, priced at $100, then the fee for the evaluation is $20,000 (American Nurses Association, 2004). The only product currently recognized is Cerner Corporation CareNet Solutions (American Nurses Association, 2004). The recognition signifies that the software in the Cerner system has met the standards set by NIDSEC. The direct care/bedside nurse must understand the importance of the inclusion of standardized nursing languages in the software sold by vendors and demand the use of a standardized nursing language in these systems.

Benefits of Standardized Languages

The use of standardized nursing languages has many advantages for the direct care/bedside nurse. These include: better communication among nurses and other health care providers, increased visibility of nursing interventions, improved patient care, enhanced data collection to evaluate nursing care outcomes, greater adherence to standards of care, and facilitated assessment of nursing competency. These advantages for the bedside/direct care nurse are discussed below.

Better Communication among Nurses and Other Health Care Providers

Improved communication with other nurses, health care professionals, and administrators of the institutions in which nurses work is a key benefit of using a standardized nursing language. Physicians realized the value of a standardized language in 1893 (The International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, 2003) with the beginning of the standardization of medical diagnosis that has become the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) (Clark & Phil, 1999). A more recent language, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), provides a common language for mental disorders. When an obstetrician lists “failure to progress” on a patient’s chart or a psychiatrist names the diagnosis “paranoid schizophrenia, chronic,” other physicians, health care practitioners, and third-party payers understand the patient’s diagnosis.

Improved communication with other nurses, health care professionals, and administrators of the institutions in which nurses work is a key benefit of using a standardized nursing language. ICD-10 and DSM-IV are coded by a system of numbers for input into computers. The IDC-10 is a coding system used mainly for billing purposes by organizations and practitioners while the DSM-IV is a categorization system for psychiatric diagnoses. The DSM-IV categories have an ICD-10 counterpart code that is used for billing purposes.