The year 2026 marks the completion of the 2021-2026 five-year strategic planning cycle for the Nursing Knowledge: Big Data Science (NKBDS) Initiative. Guided by a shared vision of transforming nursing data into actionable knowledge that improves health and healthcare, NKBDS participants have brought together nurse scientists, clinicians, educators, academic leaders, informaticians, nursing executives, health system leaders, policymakers, and industry partners for over a decade.
Over the past five years, the initiative has evolved from a collection of workgroups into mature integrative year-around working groups as a national community of practice. Through annual conferences, collaborative projects, publications, educational programs, diverse organizational leadership and presentations, and standards-development activities, NKBDS has strengthened connections across academia, practice, industry, and professional organizations while fostering a culture of innovation, shared learning, and common purpose anchored in advancing the health of individuals, families, communities, and the planet. The initiative has focused on building the foundation, advancing standards and interoperability, strengthening education and workforce development, advancing nursing value through data, recognizing lessons learned, and resolutely looking forward.
Building the Foundation
A central accomplishment of the 2021-2026 Strategic Plan was the establishment of a sustainable infrastructure for collaboration. Workgroups expanded their activities beyond annual conference meetings to support year-round engagement, resulting in the development of new resources, educational offerings, publications, and partnerships. They also broadened its reach through the NKBDS e-Repository, vision-centered conference proceedings, webinars, educational programs, and dissemination activities that collectively increased visibility and engagement across the nursing informatics and nursing communities.
Advancing Standards and Interoperability
Significant progress was made in advancing sharable and comparable nursing data through standards development and interoperability initiatives. Workgroups contributed to the development and refinement of nursing knowledge models, terminology mappings, and assessment frameworks designed to support data access, reuse, analytics, decision support, and future artificial intelligence applications. Efforts such as the Head-to-Toe Assessment Toolkit, the Pain Knowledge Model, Falls Prevention initiatives, and work involving FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources), SNOMED CT (Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine - Clinical Terms), and LOINC (Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes), and extending collaboration with organizations such as ANA, the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN), the American Academy of Nursing (AAN), AMIA, and HIMSS, demonstrate the Initiative's commitment to advancing the foundational infrastructure needed for interoperable nursing data and its impact on nursing care.
Strengthening Education and Workforce Development
The initiative also expanded its role in preparing the nursing workforce for increasingly digital and data-driven healthcare environments. Educational activities grew substantially throughout the strategic planning period and included data literacy initiatives, journal clubs, faculty development activities, microlearning resources, competency-building programs, and collaborative educational projects. More recently, workgroups have increasingly focused on artificial intelligence literacy, digital health competencies, and strategies for preparing nurses to lead technology-enabled transformation.
Advancing Nursing Value Through Data
The Nursing Value, Policy and Advocacy, and related workgroups contributed important conceptual, educational, and advocacy efforts designed to improve the visibility of nursing contributions within nursing and healthcare systems. These activities assisted in advancing national conversations surrounding nursing value, nursing-sensitive outcomes, workforce measurement, and the Unique Nurse Identifier while highlighting the importance of standardized nursing data as a foundation for demonstrating nursing impact.
Recognizing Lessons Learned
While the initiative achieved substantial progress during this strategic planning cycle, several important lessons emerged. First, meaningful progress in nursing informatics requires sustained and expanded collaboration among researchers, clinicians, educators, healthcare organizations, professional societies, and industry partners, with engagement across all levels and types of health care providers and disciplines. Second, standards, frameworks, and educational resources are necessary but insufficient on their own; sustained attention to dissemination and adoption is what determines whether they translate into changed practice. Finally, successful innovation depends not only on technology, but also on leadership, governance, workforce preparation, and organizational readiness within and beyond informatics.
Resolutely Looking Forward
The initiative enters its next planning cycle from a position of strength, with an established foundation of standards, tools, and partnerships to build upon. Emerging priorities include ensuring that nursing data remains sharable, comparable, interoperable, and actionable across healthcare settings while preparing nurses for practice environments that will continue to evolve rapidly over the coming decade.
The NKBDS leadership is resolute in advancing strategic planning for 2026-2031. The initial action during the conference was to leverage AI, the wisdom of the leadership representing all working groups, and Together We Transform (https://unitedwetransform.com/). This effort reflected on thirteen years of work done together, watching the evolution of a body of work no other group in nursing has built, reflecting on our own work, levels of adoption or lack of it, and welcoming bold visioning of the next five years or more. This experience of no speeches, no slides invited authentic conversation looking at what has not worked, naming it out loud, and only then designing what comes next. What is born of candor, patience, listening, and welcoming a bold future is what comes next — watch for our NKBDS strategic plan update.