Data mining nursing care plans of end-of-life patients: a study to improve healthcare decision making.

Purpose: To reveal hidden patterns and knowledge present in nursing care information documented with standardized nursing terminologies on end-of-life (EOL) hospitalized patients.

Method: 596 episodes of care that included pain as a problem on a patient's care plan were examined using statistical and data mining tools. The data were extracted from the Hands-On Automated Nursing Data System database of nursing care plan episodes (n = 40,747) coded with NANDA-I, Nursing Outcomes Classification, and Nursing Intervention Classification (NNN) terminologies.

Current state of pain care for hospitalized patients at end of life.

We report findings on the current state of pain care in hospitals for end-of-life (EOL) patients using longitudinal data from 8 diverse medical-surgical units located in 4 different Midwestern hospitals over 24 months. We identified 1425 EOL care episodes, 596 (41.3%) of which had a pain diagnosis.