Probing the EHR for Standardized Nursing Data.

Nursing documentation is essential for the welfare of patients and for productive communication between healthcare professionals. Currently, nursing care is documented by means of standardized and specific non-standardized nursing terminologies that various healthcare companies provide. Because of significant differences between terminologies, nursing professionals devote considerable time to map distinct terminologies by manually searching terminology databases or books. We present an automated approach that finds mappings between terminologies of two widely-used nursing care plans: it is based on UMLS as an intermediate resource, and on similarity computed via language models. According to our nursing team experts, our best-performing model found accurate mappings for approximately 54 percent of terms.