The Value of a Unique Nurse Identifier to Improve Patient Outcomes

Despite the history of nursing's contributions in helping patients, systems, and facilities achieve high-quality care, nursing-sensitive outcomes have been difficult to quantify. Without a mechanism to enable the selection of data describing nurses' roles as individuals, it is challenging for nurses and nurse leaders to find tangible evidence of patient care provision to demonstrate the impact of nursing care on patient outcomes. The Nursing Knowledge Big Data Science conference and Policy and Advocacy Workgroup convened in 2013 to advance a national action plan to ensure nursing data capture in a sharable and comparable format. This workgroup has identified several workstreams for prioritized focus, including developing health IT policy for the best use of nurse-sensitive data. This poster will highlight the workgroup's efforts over the last seven years to advance the use of a unique nurse identifier. This session will also provide foundational information about the vital role a unique nurse identifier plays in measuring the impact and value of nursing practice and its contribution to improving patient outcomes. Nursing's contribution to individuals' and communities' health and care is difficult to measure and often invisible. This lack of visibility is due, in part, to the absence of a unique identifier for nurses. The Nursing Knowledge: Big Data Policy and Advocacy workgroup has identified the standardized use of a national nurse identifier as a critical element, important to the underlying infrastructure of sharable and comparable nursing data. Without a unique nurse identifier, data aggregation, and data use to improve nursing practice are not possible. Nurses can use documentation to measure their contributions to improvements in individual and population health outcomes, patient safety, operational efficiency, and clinical effectiveness. Nurse leaders have identified the need for a unique nurse identifier, without which the aggregation and use of data to improve nursing practice is not possible. Hospitals and health systems need to uniquely identify nurses in the EHR, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, and other technologies and health IT systems for documentation, education, research training, and quality improvement purposes. The Nursing Knowledge: Big Data Science Policy and Advocacy Workgroup is collaborating with key stakeholders to achieve an optimal solution, such as using a unique nurse identifier to demonstrate the value of nursing. This poster session will help learners understand what a unique nurse identifier is. It will also explain why using a unique nurse identifier is essential as the content outlines the benefits and implications of adopting an identifier and policy recommendations.

Learning Outcome: After completing this learning activity, the participant will be able to assess innovations being used by other professionals in the specialty and evaluate the potential of implementing the improvements into practice.