The ACW Project: A Conceptual Model for Advancing Evidence-Based Nursing Practice through Technology

The impact of nursing practice has been relatively invisible in the healthcare system to date.  The Knowledge-based Nursing Initiative is built on a conceptual framework that identifies key nursing phenomena, retrieves and synthesizes the best nursing knowledge available from multiple sources for nursing diagnosis and interventions.  The model then identifies evidence-based “actionable” nursing interventions and builds this knowledge into nursing clinical decision support as a part of an electronic health record.  The model also defines the need for the use of systematically coded nursing language in clinical documentation so as to enable ready retrieval of nursing practice data so as to study the relationships between nursing practice data and client descriptor and outcome data.  The model and exemplar nursing phenomena will be explained.