A Systematic Method to Document Population-Level Nursing Interventions in an Electronic Health System

Many public health electronic health systems lack the specificity to distinguish between individual- and population-based levels of care provided by public health nurses. Data that describe the broad scope of the everyday practice of public health nurses are critical to providing evidence of their effectiveness in promoting community health, which may not be fully appreciated in an arena of scarce resources. This article describes a method to document population-based nursing practice by adding population-based interventions to the nursing taxonomy underlying an electronic health information system. These interventions, derived from the Intervention Wheel, were incorporated into the Omaha System taxonomy, the conceptual framework for the Automated Community Health Information System (ACHIS), which is a longstanding data system used to capture nursing practice in community nursing centers. This article includes a description of the development and testing of the system's ability to capture the practice of the district public health nurse model. This method of adapting an existing data system to capture population-based interventions could be replicated by public health administrators interested in better evaluating the processes and outcomes of public health nursing and other public health professionals.