
By Tamara Macieira, PhD, RN
Nursing-generated data holds immense potential to transform patient care, research, and health care system operations. At the point of care, these data can inform real-time clinical decisions, enhance patient safety, and improve outcomes. For example, the analysis of detailed standardized nursing care plans can help predict the length of stay for patients receiving palliative care and re-admissions for hospitalized patients. Additionally, nursing progress notes can be used to extract signs and symptoms of delirium.
While nurses have long been the backbone of health care delivery, their work is often undervalued. Many health care providers and patients don’t fully grasp the range, depth, and complexity behind the care nurses provide daily.
As frontline providers, they are often the first to care for patients and the last to ensure every detail is addressed before the patient transitions to the next phase of care. It’s no surprise that nurses have been voted the most trusted profession for over 20 consecutive years. Patients admire nurses’ caring and kindness skills. Society values nurses’ dedication. And yet, as a profession, nursing science and nurses’ expertise remain invisible within health care.
Despite nurses being at the patient’s bedside 24/7, the massive impact nurses have on patient and economic outcomes is often overlooked. Moreover, the incredible amount of data nurses generate about patient care remains underused in both research and clinical decision-making. This lack of recognition not only undervalues the nursing profession but also limits the full potential of health care.
The overlooked impact of nursing data
Nurses routinely document large volumes of patient data in electronic health records (EHRs). These data reflect critical information about the nursing care provided, care coordination across interdisciplinary teams, and patient progress. Nurse documentation includes patient assessments, care plans, medication administration records, vital signs, and patient education, providing a comprehensive picture of patient care and outcomes. Nonetheless, their potential remains largely untapped due to various factors, including limitations in EHR design, usability, and lack of nursing data standardization. Current EHR systems often fail to make this information easily accessible, contributing to this underutilization of nursing-generated data. Also, without consistent data standards, it becomes challenging to analyze nursing-generated data across systems or institutions, which limits its broader applicability and visibility. Standardized nursing languages should be adopted for seamless implementation into the workflow. Action needs to be taken to ensure nursing care is consistently documented, easily aggregated, and efficiently processed. Additionally, the nursing documentation workflow must be streamlined to improve overall effectiveness.
But why does nursing data matter?
On a larger scale, nursing data can be aggregated across health systems through clinical data research networks, and advanced methodologies like federated learning – a way of using multiple data sources together – can be applied. One example is a project developed by our team at UF, which is integrating nursing care plan data extracted from 12 hospitals across Florida into the OneFlorida+ Clinical Research Network. This was the first initiative to include nursing-generated data in large data trusts. These approaches allow researchers to analyze vast datasets while maintaining patient privacy and security. Such large-scale data analyses can uncover patterns and trends that inform evidence-based practice, optimize resource allocation, improve health equity, and bring visibility to the nursing profession.
A Call to Action
Realizing the potential of nursing-generated data requires a concerted effort from nurses, health care organizations, researchers, and policymakers. Key steps include:
– Advocating for Better EHR Usability: Systems used by nurses must be designed by teams led by nurses to ensure they meet the needs of frontline providers.
– Standardizing Nursing Data: Harmonization of data standards with common data models, which is a way of mapping different data concepts to the same language and framework, and consistent use of standardized nursing languages are essential for effective data aggregation and analysis across multiple organizations and settings.
– Linking Data with Artificial Intelligence (AI): There can be no effective AI without high-quality data; nursing data must be harmonized and accessible to drive AI-powered nursing innovations and solutions.
– Investing in Nursing Informatics Education: Equipping nurses with informatics skills will empower them to lead in data-driven healthcare initiatives focused on problems nurses face every day.
– Promoting Collaboration Across Disciplines: Interdisciplinary efforts are crucial to fully leverage the insights contained in nursing data.
Your Turn
It’s time to bring visibility to the nursing profession and recognize the profound impact of nurses and the data we nurses collect!
I invite you to attend the 2025 Rita Kobb Nursing & Health Informatics National Symposium on Feb. 28th at the University of Florida Reitz Union, Gainesville. This free symposium will explore the intersection between nursing, data, data science, implementation science, and clinical practice.
It is your chance to learn more about nursing-generated data and informatics and join our movement to ensure that nurses’ voices are heard, and their contributions are valued — transforming health care into a more inclusive, efficient, and patient-centered system.