VA STANDARDS AND INTEROPERABILITY: NURSING TERMINOLOGY STANDARDS PROJECT

For the "VA Standards and Interoperability Nursing Terminology Standards", J P Systems performed clinical terminology services for the Office of the Chief Nursing Informatics. Our clinical terminology team created 1,500 maps for the Office of the Chief Nursing Informatics Officer (OCNIO) Standardized Nursing Documentation Project.  This project provided guidance to VA standards project teams on data standards including the successful launch of the Federal Health Terminology Model initiative with active participation from a dozen federal agencies.

We defined standard clinical terminologies for Nursing Flowsheets and created a pressure ulcer risk assessment model which establishes standardized codes to enable interoperability among healthcare systems including CDS alerts. We mapped the identified VHA Nursing Domain terms for skin and wound care including nursing assessment, interventions, and patient outcomes to Clinical Care Classification (CCC) System terminology for skin integrity to include Care Components, Nursing Diagnosis, Nursing Intervention, Nursing Actions and Outcomes; mapping Clinical Care Classification System terminology for skin integrity to Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine-Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT).

For the VA, "nursing is the backbone of the health care industry. Nurses provide screenings, collect information that could be critical to your health care, and support treatment of sick, hurt, and dying patients. That’s why it is important that nurses at VA not only have the skills to deliver quality care, but also possess the confidence to make sound clinical decisions" Nursing graduates dive into simulation to improve Veteran care - VA News