Beyond Hospital-Level Aggregated Data: A Methodology to Adapt Clinical Data From the Electronic Health Record for Nursing Unit-Level Research.

Background: Studies of nurse staffing frequently use data aggregated at the hospital level that do not provide the appropriate context to inform unit-level decisions, such as nurse staffing.

Objectives: Describe a method to link patient data collected during the provision of routine care and recorded in the electronic health record (EHR) to the nursing units where care occurred in a national dataset.

Research Design: We identified all Veterans Health Administration acute care hospitalizations in the calendar year 2019 nationwide.