Structuring clinical nursing knowledge using PCAPS - Patient condition adaptive path system

Quality assurance has become key concerns in healthcare and it is important to standardize the processes for healthcare properly. Though it was needed to describe process of healthcare diagnosis and treatment, it was very difficult by the reason of being service products including complexity and expertise. We challenged to visible, structurize, standardize and IT-systematize of clinical knowledge for healthcare quality management. The patient condition adaptive path system (PCAPS) was developed. PCAPS describes an overall flow of possible clinical pathways that a patient's disease state may trace and detailed medical judgment and treatments for each disease state. It suggests possibility of quality assurance using the standard plan of medical treatment process. PCAPS comprises two major tools: clinical process chart and unit sheet. These describe the total flow of treatment and the concrete medical treatments involved in each step. The PCAPS master is proposed. This is a glossary of the terms that are used in the unit sheet. Each master file has special structure for each work domain. In other words, PCAPS describes the standard process of healthcare using the clinical process chart, unit sheet, and PCAPS master. We apply nursing master file for nursing care action and observation offered by MEDIS-DC in Japan. Through we developed many PCAPS contents, we identified description of structured nursing knowledge. The nursing master file was brushed up by designing PCAPS content using it. It was suggested that PCAPS contents as standard clinical plan designed by medical specialist team included nursing knowledge.