Dear Lillee,

Nice to read your comments in the American Nurse but I cannot understand why you do not consider or mention the need for a standardized nursing terminology to use for measuring metrics.  The International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Health-Related Problems (ICD-10) has for over 150 years (since 1850) collected coded metrics or statistics for originally reporting the causes of deaths for mortality calculations; and then, with the Sixth Revision in 1948 to include non-fatal diseases; and, continued through the Ninth Revision in 1975 to meet the statistical needs of widely differing organizations. The ICD-10 uses an innovative coding scheme of one letter followed by a three or four number-character level doubling the coding framework of the Ninth Revision. Tow volumes have been developed and designed to code both Disease Conditions and Medical Procedures.

We, in nursing, cannot ever calculate accurately and with validity metrics or gather statistics without using a standardized coded nursing terminology like the Clinical Care Classification (CCC) System which has been approved by the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) in 2007 and has a similar coding structure for collecting and aggregating  data on nursing diagnoses (problems), nursing interventions and actions, and nursing outcomes.   It is such a simple solution- to start and use a nursing terminology — one that the American Nurses Association (ANA) has ‘recognized’ (1991/2) and endorsed by HHS (2006/7/8) and recommended as interoperable and usable for the electronic  processing of nursing documentation.

WHY are we so rigid!

WHY can we not change!

WHY can we not move into the electronic age!

WHY can we not begin to use a standardized coded nursing language such as the CCC System to get standardized nursing metrics?

Dr. Virginia K. Saba

Developer, CCC System