International Council of Nurses (ICN) eHealth Resources

The International Classification for Nursing Practice (ICNP) has a 25-year long history of development work with the International Council of Nurses (ICN). The aim of the ICNP is to represent nursing terminology and promote international harmonization among multiple health terminologies for use in interdisciplinary practice across health delivery settings and specialties. ICNP is unique among nursing terminologies as it is an international, logic-based standard. More recently, ICN has focused on implementation of ICNP to support nursing practice. ICN has partnered with health system vendors and developers of other terminologies in nursing and healthcare, for example Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine-Clinical Terms (SNOMED-CT), Clinical Care Classification and the World Health Organisation Family of International Classification. ICN has also collaborated with the National Library of Medicine (NLM) which is the coordinating center of health terminology standards in the U.S. The Unified Medical Language System maintained by the NLM is a terminology resource that integrates multiple terminologies in a unified framework and provides terminology cross-mappings. Another new ICN eHealth initiative is using ICNP to guide the development of health record resources for use across specific areas of nursing expertise and practice, including an international standard for an eNursing Summary and ICNP Catalogues. In May, the ICNP 2013 Release will be available and this presentation will provide an update on how to access the terminology and new resources to assist in implementation and education.