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The electronic health record (EHR) is a documentation tool that yields data useful in enhancing patient safety, evaluating care quality, maximizing efficiency, and measuring staffing needs. Although nurses applaud the EHR, they also indicate dissatisfaction with its design and cumbersome electronic processes. This article describes the views of nurses shared by members of the Nursing Practice Committee of the Missouri Nurses Association; it encourages nurses to share their EHR concerns with Information Technology (IT) staff and vendors and to take their place at the table when nursing-related IT decisions are made. In this article, we describe the experiential-reflective reasoning and action model used to understand staff nurses’ perspectives, share committee reflections and recommendations for improving both documentation and documentation technology, and conclude by encouraging nurses to develop their documentation and informatics skills. Nursing issues include medication safety, documentation and standards of practice, and EHR efficiency. IT concerns include interoperability, vendors, innovation, nursing voice, education, and collaboration.

The amount of health care data in our world has been exploding, and the ability to store, aggregate, and combine data and then use the results to perform deep analyses have become ever more important. "Big data," large pools of data that can be captured, communicated, aggregated, stored, and analyzed, are now part of every sector and function of the global economy. While most research into big data thus far has focused on the question of their volume, there is evidence that the business and economic possibilities of big data and their wider implications are important for consideration. It is even offering the possibility that health care data could become the most valuable asset over the next 5 years as "secondary use" of electronic health record data takes off.

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The use of nursing big data sets for value-based measurement is novel. Nursing value measurement depends on the availability of essential data attributes in the electronic health record related to nursing care delivered (what happened, when, and the result seen). Key in measuring value is a standardized structure and format of these attributes for enabling uniform consistent analysis, along with data sets that are sharable and comparable across individuals and groups, time, organization, and practice focus. The foundation of such sharable and comparable data sets would represent at a minimum individual essential nurse care actions and the resulting patient outcome(s). While nurses generate an extraordinary amount of health-related data, healthcare information systems are not designed to collect structured data that reflect the unique attributes of nursing care or support nursing analytic activities that would measure value. More important, the multidimensional features of the nursing process are difficult to untangle and differentiate from other healthcare workers and nonnursing care activities. The complexity of nursing knowledge work has limited the development of nursing data science methods like value measurement and discouraged value versus cost discussions. This article sets out to describe nursing value measurement and an approach that nurse scientists are maximizing through methods adapted from agile project management, including user stories, and business analysis processes to recognize nurses as primary contributors to patient outcomes and value generation. Nursing Value User Story methods deconstruct complex nursing scenarios into user stories that capture nursing actions as standardized data that can be mapped to a common nursing data model. Methods described here are being used in pilot research at Los Angeles Children's Hospital, and results will be available in 2019.