Challenges using electronic nursing routine data for outcome analyses: A mixed methods study

OBJECTIVES: To explore the challenges of secondary use of routinely collected data for analyzing nursing-sensitive outcomes in Austrian acute care hospitals. METHOD: A convergent parallel mixed methods design was performed. We conducted a quantitative representative survey with nursing managers from 32 Austrian general acute care hospitals and 11 qualitative semi-structured interviews with nursing quality management experts. Both results were first analyzed independently and afterward merged in the discussion. RESULTS: On average, 76% of nursing documentation is already electronically supported in the surveyed Austrian hospitals. However, existing nursing data is seldom used for secondary purposes such as nursing-sensitive outcome analyses. This is due to four major reasons: First, hospitals often do not have a data strategy for the secondary use of routine data. Second, hospitals partly lack the use of standardized and uniform nursing terminologies, especially for nursing evaluation. Third, routine nursing data is often not documented correctly and completely. Fourth, data on nursing-sensitive outcomes is usually collected in specific documentation forms not integrated into routine documentation. CONCLUSION: The awareness of the possibilities for secondary use of nursing data for nursing-sensitive outcome analyses in Austrian hospitals is still in its infancy. Therefore, nursing staff and nursing management must be trained to understand how to collect and process nursing data for nursing-sensitive outcome analyses. Further studies would be interesting in order to determine the factors that influence the decision-making processes for the secondary use of nursing data for outcome analyses.