Implications of Electronic Health Record Meaningful Use Legislation for Nursing Clinical Information System Development and Refinement

Purpose: To describe what electronic health record meaningful use requirements mean for nursing clinical information system (CIS) development. Conclusions: The nursing CIS in many, if not most hospitals, has a number of critical design inadequacies that constrain the meaningful use of nursing data to ensure quality outcomes for patients and data‐based maturing of the nursing profession. Implications: It is the responsibility and obligation of nurses to ensure that CISs are designed for the meaningful use of nursing clinical data. To accomplish these ends, interoperable clinical nursing data must be documented in a properly integrated operational CIS, and must be retrievable and stored in data repositories for analysis and reports.