Electronic Health Records as Information Source in Assessment of the Effectiveness of Delivered Care - A Pilot Study.

Effectiveness is a key element of high quality health services. The aim of this pilot study was to explore the potential of electronic health records (EHR) as an information source for assessing the effectiveness of nursing care by investigating the appearance of nursing processes in the documentation of care. Deductive and inductive content analysis were used in a manual annotation of ten patients' EHRs. The analysis resulted in the identification of 229 documented nursing processes. The results indicate that EHRs can be used in decision support systems for assessing effectiveness of nursing care, however, future work is needed to verify these findings in a larger data set and extend to other dimensions related to care quality.