Activities and products aligned with the NKBDS initiative
Data science & clinical analytics
The Data Science & Clinical Analytics (DSCA) workgroup advanced three major goals over the past year, focusing on workforce development, data science literacy, and interdisciplinary engagement in data-driven nursing research and education.
Goal 1: Develop Hands-On Studies to Build Data Science Skills. Led by Steve Johnson, the workgroup continued to leverage the All of Us Research Workbench to support project development and promote data science capacity among its members. Approximately 50% of participants have completed the necessary training and gained access to the Workbench. Members are actively exploring current datasets, including a project on pain and another exploring the use of metformin. These projects utilize the OMOP data model, which supports the integration of diverse data types, such as survey and genetic data; however, nursing-specific elements remain limited.
Goal 2: Promote Data and Data Science Literacy. Led by Mikyoung Lee, this subgroup seeks to define and advance the concepts of data literacy and data science literacy in nursing, the task force conducted a critical review of the literature and educational resources spanning academic, clinical, and industry perspectives. This work resulted in a paper presented at NI 2024 (Manchester) and a final manuscript that is nearing submission to a peer-reviewed nursing journal.
Goal 3: Launch of Data Science & Clinical Analytics Journal Club. Led by Lisiane Pruinelli and Raga Bjarnadottir, this new effort aimed to launch a Journal Club to strengthen members’ understanding of AI and data science as they relate to nursing practice, research, and policy. The journal club aims to promote interdisciplinary discussion and the application of cutting-edge analytics in nursing. Specific objectives include:
- Reviewing key scientific publications on AI and data science in nursing
- Encouraging critical discussion of application to clinical workflows
- Exploring implications for patient care and outcomes
- Enhancing awareness of AI’s role in evidence-based practice
The inaugural webinar was held on February 4, 2025, with 54 attendees.
Determinants of health
The Determinants of Health workgroup had a change in leadership during 2024–2025, which impacted the progress and rethinking of their overall purpose. Despite efforts to reengage members, attempts to restart the workgroup were minimally successful. The team plans to gauge renewed interest during the 2025 NKBDS Conference and has considered merging with another workgroup to continue advancing this important area of focus.
Digital health and innovation
The Digital Health and Innovation workgroup continued its mission to highlight the role of nurses in advancing the design, development, and deployment of digital health tools. The 2024-2025 year’s deliverables emphasized the impact of novel technologies and the integration of informatics into care delivery.
Knowledge modeling and encoding
The Knowledge Modeling and Encoding (KME) workgroup advanced four key projects aligned with the NKBDS mission to support semantic interoperability and data reusability in nursing documentation.
Pain Knowledge Model. The original Pain Information Model was revised and renamed the Pain Knowledge Model to improve alignment with HL7 FHIR standards. This revision facilitates the exchange of healthcare information and supports interoperability. Three pre-coordinated assessments were converted into post-coordinated terms, and corresponding LOINC® requests for new observation terms were submitted. Answer lists were mapped to SNOMED CT®. Draft LOINC terms were also created for a body site identification panel, incorporating mapped nursing documentation needs.
The workgroup initiated data cleansing and definition assignments for non-pharmacologic nursing interventions, with plans for expert validation and mapping to SNOMED CT®. Revisions to the LOINC Pain Assessment Panel are underway, with the removal of superfluous pre-coordinated terms in favor of new, interoperable post-coordinated structures.
Falls Prevention Knowledge Model. The Falls project completed submissions to LOINC for two evidence-based fall risk assessment scales. Submissions for mobility assessments are in progress, and additional terms were requested to reflect observational data elements in two new assessment tools.
Heuristics for Mapping. The team documented changes to assessment mapping heuristics and began drafting heuristics for mapping interventions. A planning team for a formal Heuristics project has defined the project scope and identified volunteers.
Article Development. The workgroup met to determine the focus and audience for an upcoming publication. Meetings will continue in May to move the manuscript forward.
Learning collaborative for digital health
The Learning Collaborative for Digital Health (LCDH) advanced its mission through focused subgroup efforts that produced educational resources and practice tools for nurse educators, practitioners, and health systems. These outputs align with the NKBDS vision by equipping nurses to effectively leverage data, information, and knowledge in clinical and academic settings.
Subgroup efforts contributed to the following deliverables:
- A white paper outlining best practices for teaching undergraduate nursing informatics
- A final manuscript describing the Integrated Multi-Modal Framework for informatics education
- A faculty/educator self-assessment tool to evaluate informatics competencies
Most projects have been completed and shared, while others remain in progress and are slated for finalization in the coming year.
Nursing value
The Nursing Value workgroup met monthly throughout the year, with attendance ranging from three to nine members. Meetings focused on manuscript development, member updates, and cross-workgroup collaborations. A major accomplishment was the initiation of a LinkedIn platform to disseminate ideas and gather feedback, along with a survey distributed to gather perceptions about nursing value.
Scholarly Activities. The workgroup emphasized manuscript development as its core goal for the year. Thanks to contributions from members and coordination with the Journal of Nursing Economic$, five pieces related to the concept of nursing value have been published or are in press. These publications aim to raise awareness among nurse administrators, practicing nurses, nursing faculty, and informatics professionals about the importance of operationalizing and measuring the value of nursing practice.
Policy and advocacy
The Policy and Advocacy workgroup focused its efforts on promoting the Unique Nurse Identifier (UNI) to support national nursing visibility, accountability, and interoperability in healthcare systems. The team developed and widely disseminated an infographic explaining the UNI's importance. This resource has been shared across nursing and informatics communities to elevate awareness and support policy advancement.
Transforming documentation
The Transforming Documentation workgroup completed a major deliverable in 2024–2025: the development and dissemination of a harmonized Head-to-Toe (H2T) Assessment Toolkit for adult patients in acute care settings. This effort was driven by the need to reduce documentation burden while enabling high-value data reuse for care coordination, population health, and research.
Head-to-Toe Assessment Model. The H2T Task Force—formed as a cross-workgroup initiative—defined ideal nursing assessment content based on contributions from five NKBDS workgroups (Transforming Documentation, Care Coordination, Social Determinants of Health, Data Science & Clinical Analytics, and Knowledge Modeling & Encoding). Collaborative input was also received from leading healthcare systems and vendor partners, including the VA Health Care (Cerner Model System), UCHealth, Atlantic Health, Kaiser Permanente, Montefiore, Elsevier (Oracle/Cerner), and Epic Foundation System.
The result is a minimized, harmonized assessment dataset designed to reduce charting variation across systems and vendors. The toolkit supports standardized documentation that can improve care quality and enable robust clinical decision-making.
Collaboration and impact across workgroups
Individuals & Families
Collaborative work across multiple NKBDS workgroups has produced tangible benefits for individuals and families. The Transforming Documentation workgroup advanced a standardized Head-to-Toe (H2T) assessment model, currently being mapped to SNOMED CT® and LOINC® through partnership with the Knowledge Modeling and Encoding (KME) workgroup. This ensures more consistent and accurate nursing documentation at the point of care, ultimately improving continuity and quality of care for individual patients. Similarly, the Digital Health and Innovation workgroup highlighted how nurses apply emerging technologies in direct care settings, supporting practical, patient-facing applications. Educational outputs from the Learning Collaborative for Digital Health (LCDH) also empower individual nurses across roles to apply informatics in ways that benefit their day-to-day interactions with patients and families.
Communities
The NKBDS workgroups fostered community-level benefits by creating resources and frameworks that enhance local engagement and healthcare delivery. DSCA’s collaboration with HIMSS’ data literacy subgroup, featuring guest speaker Whende Carroll, catalyzed conversations around joint strategies to elevate data fluency among nurses. Journal Club sessions hosted by DSCA also brought together both nurses and non-nurses to explore analytics applications in community care contexts. The Nursing Value workgroup further emphasized community-level contributions by developing use cases and user stories that quantify nursing’s impact in team-based and population health models—particularly through the integration of social determinants of health insights shared by the Context of Care workgroup.
Populations
The cross-group collaboration significantly advanced population health analytics and data-driven nursing science. DSCA and KME workgroups worked together to align pain modeling across both terminologies and analytic pipelines, which informs scalable frameworks to analyze and improve outcomes across large populations. Publications produced by DSCA and Nursing Value offer blueprints for educators and researchers to extend this impact into new settings.
The Transforming Documentation and KME workgroups came together to map and implement semantically interoperable assessment tools to enable the aggregation of structured data at scale—supporting research, quality measurement, and systems-level change. These interoperable solutions set the foundation for broader applications in population health and nursing analytics. The LCDH’s efforts to disseminate educational materials and frameworks also support scalability, ensuring that population-level initiatives are reinforced through robust training and dissemination strategies across both academic and clinical environments.
Cross-Cutting Themes
Several cross-cutting efforts illustrate how collaboration itself became a mechanism for innovation. The Pain User Story, originating in the Nursing Value workgroup, was refined with stakeholder input and is now under consideration by KME for terminology modeling. Meanwhile, the Transforming Documentation workgroup’s model is being piloted in health systems, with early findings to be shared at the NKBDS pre-conference.
These examples reflect a growing ecosystem of inter-group support that amplifies impact. Whether by harmonizing data models, co-developing education tools, or piloting implementation strategies, the NKBDS initiative demonstrates that collaboration across workgroups yields stronger, more inclusive, and actionable outcomes for all stakeholders.
Core concepts engaged and their utilization
The NKBDS initiative continues to serve as a fertile ground for operationalizing core nursing concepts in innovative, data-driven ways. Across workgroups, core concepts such as pain, value of nursing, determinants of health, terminology standards, and nursing assessments were not only engaged theoretically but actively embedded into workflows, analytic strategies, and education.
Pain emerged as a unifying concept across multiple domains. The Nursing Value workgroup developed a robust Pain User Story, incorporating structured data from electronic health records to articulate the clinical and economic contributions of nursing care in pain management. This story became a shared tool for further modeling efforts in both the Data Science and Clinical Analytics (DSCA) and Knowledge Modeling and Encoding (KME) workgroups. These collaborations supported crosswalks between real-world analytics and standardized terminology, offering a dual-lens to understand and quantify pain-related outcomes.
The concept of nursing value was central to several workgroups’ efforts to demonstrate nursing’s role in improving outcomes and optimizing care delivery. The Nursing Value workgroup aligned its modeling efforts with both the Context of Care workgroup (to embed SDoH) and industry partners such as NANDA-I and PeriOp Nursing. These collaborations extended the definition of value beyond efficiency to include equity, experience, and safety. Their work positioned nursing contributions as both measurable and meaningful across care settings.
Terminology and documentation standards formed a technical backbone for many of the core concepts in use. The KME workgroup took the lead in mapping nursing-specific assessments and interventions to LOINC® and SNOMED CT®, with active input from the Transforming Documentation workgroup. This harmonization effort ensures that nursing concepts are interoperable across systems and actionable in practice, laying the groundwork for scalable, standards-based data use.
Social determinants of health were also interwoven into multiple use cases, particularly by the Context of Care and Nursing Value workgroups. Their joint work aimed to ensure that core nursing concepts are not siloed but are reflective of the environments in which patients live and receive care. This has resulted in more contextually aware and equitable frameworks, which will support future models that capture the full spectrum of nursing’s influence.
Finally, nursing assessments, such as the Head-to-Toe model developed in the Transforming Documentation workgroup, provided concrete examples of how conceptual models can evolve into standardized tools that serve both bedside practice and population analytics. The integration of this model into KME’s terminology mapping and pre-conference dissemination efforts exemplify the collaborative spirit of the initiative and its commitment to advancing nursing knowledge.
Together, these efforts illustrate not only the engagement with core concepts, but their intentional and strategic utilization across workgroups to build a shared, scalable infrastructure for nursing data science. The work is not isolated—it is layered, interdependent, and advancing a collective vision of nursing knowledge in action.
Informatics and data resources utilized
Across the NKBDS initiative, workgroups utilized a variety of informatics tools and data resources to drive progress, foster evidence generation, and promote interoperability in nursing knowledge and practice.
- The Data Science and Clinical Analytics workgroup advanced its analytic capabilities by leveraging the All of Us Research Workbench, enabling access to large-scale, diverse datasets for exploratory modeling. Additionally, webinar platforms facilitated knowledge dissemination through Journal Club sessions that engaged a broad audience in data-focused dialogue.
- The Knowledge Modeling and Encoding team anchored its efforts in national interoperability frameworks, guided by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT. They utilized standards from the Interoperability Standards Advisory, specifically LOINC® for assessments and observations, and SNOMED CT® for representing nursing diagnoses, interventions, outcomes, and goals. This foundation ensured semantic alignment and cross-system usability of nursing knowledge representations.
- The Learning Collaborative for Digital Health employed Covidence to support a systematic scoping review process and utilized survey platforms and analytics tools to gather and interpret faculty input. This methodologically rigorous approach enabled the group to assess the current landscape and inform future directions for nursing innovation.
- The Nursing Value workgroup integrated multiple key resources, including LOINC, SNOMED CT, and FHIR, to support efforts in defining and measuring nursing’s economic and clinical contributions. Partnerships with the Commission for Nurse Reimbursement, American Nurses Association, and Journal of Nursing Economics—along with insights from contributors such as Cathy Ivory, Amy Garcia, Cathy Schwartz, and Elizabeth Swanson—provided a strong knowledge base. Thought leadership from Olga Yakusheva’s team further deepened the group’s analytic foundation.
- The Transforming Documentation team drew on a robust clinical dataset sourced from partner organizations using electronic health records across the U.S. and Canada. This shared resource enabled the workgroup to conduct a comparative, system-by-system crosswalk, applying data harmonization principles to generate a recommended standard dataset that is both clinically grounded and scalable.
- While the Digital Health and Innovation and Policy and Advocacy workgroups did not report specific resource use this year, the ecosystem of tools and shared learning created by other groups offers a foundation for future alignment and integration.
Addressing previous year goals and alignment with the NKBDS strategic plan
Over the past year, NKBDS workgroups made meaningful strides toward advancing their strategic priorities, each contributing in distinct ways to the collective mission of transforming nursing knowledge into actionable, interoperable, and equitable systems of care.
The Data Science and Clinical Analytics workgroup deepened its commitment to building foundational skills in artificial intelligence, data science, and analytics among nurses. Their activities were closely aligned with the AACN Essentials, underscoring a shared goal of preparing nurses for a data-driven future. Through ongoing educational engagement and knowledge dissemination, the group continued to foster a culture of inquiry and skill-building in this rapidly evolving space.
In parallel, the Knowledge Modeling and Encoding workgroup sustained its focus on mapping nursing knowledge models—specifically around pain and fall risk—to national interoperability standards. Their work not only supports the evolving infrastructure of electronic health records but also ensures that nursing concepts are represented in ways that are both machine-readable and clinically meaningful. By documenting heuristics and refining models in response to shifting standards, the group is laying the groundwork for replication and scaling. Plans for publication are underway to further elevate awareness of the essential role interoperability plays in advancing nursing science.
The Learning Collaborative for Digital Health also leaned into the AACN Essentials, developing a multi-modal framework that bridges academic preparation with practice-based needs. Their ongoing work includes a scoping review that will result in a white paper by fall 2025, with a full manuscript planned for early 2026. These efforts aim to evaluate and share best practices for preparing future nurses to lead in an increasingly digital healthcare environment. Simultaneously, the group continues to explore novel strategies for equipping educators with tools and methods to integrate informatics and digital health concepts across educational settings.
Among the most productive this year, the Nursing Value workgroup exceeded its prior goals through a series of impactful publications. With five manuscripts accepted or in press in Nursing Economic$, the group’s efforts brought national attention to the complex and evolving concept of nursing value. Key collaborations—with the Context of Care group around social determinants of health, and with thought leaders such as Olga Yakusheva—enriched their models and expanded the scope of their work. The co-chairs shared sincere appreciation for the support of Dean Connie Delaney and Associate Dean Peggy Jenkins, whose advocacy and facilitation were instrumental in bringing this work to light.
The Policy and Advocacy workgroup marked a pivotal year for the Unique Nurse Identifier (UNI) initiative. Their efforts to raise national awareness and drive stakeholder engagement have taken root across academic, clinical, and policy communities. From widely distributed infographics to invited presentations at institutions and conferences, the group has effectively positioned the UNI as a critical tool for enhancing nursing visibility and workforce analytics. Momentum has translated into real-world action: a major health IT vendor has begun development to integrate the UNI into its EHR products, an important step toward systemic adoption. This progress sets the stage for the next phase: formalizing a scalable, standards-aligned roadmap for national implementation.
Meanwhile, the Transforming Documentation group remained closely aligned with the Future of Nursing priority to reduce documentation burden while maintaining high-quality, usable clinical data. The group’s H2T initiative focused on harmonizing electronic health record content to better serve both clinical care and nursing education. This alignment with the AACN Essentials reinforces the vision of a learning, well-supported nursing workforce equipped with meaningful, efficient digital tools.
Although the Digital Health and Innovation workgroup did not report direct activities aligned with the previous year’s goals, the infrastructure and shared learning developed across other groups create valuable opportunities for collaboration and engagement moving forward.
Beyond their stated objectives, some workgroups—such as Nursing Value—also embraced new opportunities, such as integrating social determinants of health into their modeling work, demonstrating flexibility and a forward-looking approach. These additional contributions continue to reflect the broader NKBDS vision: a connected, knowledge-rich nursing ecosystem grounded in interoperability, value, and equity.
The past year’s accomplishments were made possible not only by the dedication of individual workgroups, but also by the unwavering support of leaders and partners who championed these collective efforts. As the initiative moves into its next chapter, these foundations of shared purpose and strategic alignment will continue to guide its path forward.