Dramatic changes in healthcare services have intensified practitioner``s efforts to access and use healthcare information to determine more efficacious approaches to patient problems. HL7 (Health Level Seven) organization has been developing healthcare messaging standards for the representation of clinical documents. HL7 SIG activities include developing SML/DTD and XSL.
Despite a great deal of effort paid in digital on-line healthcare services, little development has been reported in nursing area. International Council of Nurses(ICN) in an attempt to bring a uniform nursing vocabulary into a standardized Unified Nursing Language System(UNLS).
The patient care activities are recorded in various forms of nursing documents. Among them , the nursing process document contains the core nursing process describing nurses`` knowledge about patient care more than any other documents. Motivated by that, we focus on developing a digital on-line nursing process document as the goal of this research. The data elements of Nursing Process document include general patient data, nurse data, nursing process knowledge during patient care service, etc.
In this research, we develop web-based digital documents for nursing process by designing an XML/DTD and style sheets. Applying XML technology the digital representation and management for nursing process according to the recent nursing vocabulary standards specified by ICNP, XML documents create a set of tags of nursing knowledge. XML/DTD for nursing process document allows them to codify the vocabulary and syntax that users(i.e. nursing professionals) wish to use. By doing so, it is possible to search nursing vocabularies from database and display them in a form meaningful to nursing professionals. It also enables electronic exchange of information among different healthcare systems. We store DTD elements into a database and represent them tin XML document form through database queries. Databases tailored to manage XML data ...