Setting standards for nursing data sets in information systems

The American Nurses Association (ANA) has established the Nursing Information and Data Set Evaluation Center (NIDSEC). 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 to information systems. 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. Once the standards and scoring mechanisms were established, they were tested for reliability and validity. A Content Validity Index (CVI) of 0.875 was established for the scoring tool.