TILAK, Tyrolean Federal Hospitals, Nursing Board
Institute for Bioinformatics and Translational Research (UMIT)

A comprehensive electronic nursing documentation system has been established over the last years in the hospitals of TILAK (Tyrolean federal hospitals). This system covers all phases of the nursing process and therefore produces an enormous amount of highly structured data. In the past these data had been used basically for patient care and documentation purposes. In order to be able to use these data for more than just patient- or case-centered issues we are developing a so called nursing data mart (NDM), which is a data repository that aggregates and reorganizes routine nursing data according to a data model which was designed together with the TILAK nursing management board.

Development of a repository of nursing data (nursing data mart, NDM) which grants access to information and potential knowledge hidden in routine nursing data.

The TILAK hospitals use Cerner Millennium as core component of their Clinical Information System (CIS). The nursing documentation system, using the modules PowerPlan and PowerForms with PowerChart, is realized as a part of Cerner Millennium.

1. Data extraction routines export the nursing data periodically from different CIS databases into CSV files. 2. Data cleansing routines preprocess, clean and prepare the data for the following transformation processes. Data transformation processes transform the data according to the NDM data model. 3. The so cleaned and transformed data is loaded into the Nursing Data Mart.

1. A stable version of a NDM data model has been established. The Nursing Data Mart was designed according to the needs of the nursing management board of the TILAK hospitals. Central NDM element is the patient stay table providing a unique patient stay-id and the relating patient-id.

2. Workflows for extracting, cleaning, transformation and loading of the nursing data were implemented and tested.

3. The Nursing Data Mart contains data from all phases of the nursing process including NANDA-I nursing diagnoses, interventions, outcome and detailed information on the medical history and current living conditions of the patient.

Our first attention is paid to documentation quality and quality management issues. We want to investigate how we can improve processes in patient care by using information and knowledge that comes out from routine patient care data.
Exploring the information hidden in the aggregated NDM data we try to learn how we can assess, measure and in succession improve the quality of the different steps of the nursing process.

(A complete list of all publications can be found on our publications page.)