Modeling a Nursing Guideline with Standard Terminology and Unified Modeling Language for a Nursing Decision Support System: A Case Study

In recent years, Decision Support Systems (DSSs) have been developed and used to achieve "meaningful use". One approach to developing DSSs is to translate clinical guidelines into a computer-interpretable format. However, there is no specific guideline modeling approach to translate nursing guidelines to computer-interpretable guidelines. This results in limited use of DSSs in nursing. Unified modeling language (UML) is a software writing language known to accurately represent the end-users' perspective, due to its expressive characteristics. Furthermore, standard terminology enabled DSSs have been shown to smoothly integrate into existing health information systems. In order to facilitate development of nursing DSSs, the UML was used to represent a guideline for medication management for older adults encode with the International Classification for Nursing Practice (ICNP®). The UML was found to be a useful and sufficient tool to model a nursing guideline for a DSS.