Abstract
Background: The use of local nursing language in hospitals, rather than standardized language, is the biggest problem in implementing nursing information systems. That is one of the reasons why nursing information systems are not widely used in comparison with other hospital information systems in Japan.
Objective: The aim of this study was to devise a tool and evaluate it, which could be easily used by nurses to find standardized nursing terms from their local nursing vocabulary.
Design: The authors compared the accuracy and length of time required both the tool and manual matching using 28 test pairs of local terms and standardized terms.
Results: Using the tool, 26 out of 28 items were matched in two minutes compared with manual matching, in which 27 out of 28 items were matched in 60 minutes.
Conclusion: The tool took much less time for matching. The accuracy of the matching results was marginally lower than the manual matching. However, the authors think it could be improved by adding some synonyms to the database.
