Enhancing the Visibility of NP Practice in Electronic Health Records

Electronic health records (EHRs) are being rapidly adopted as a tool for nurse practitioners (NPs) to organize, document, and report data for health outcomes. The development of EHRs has focused on documenting medical information, making the nursing portion of NP practice invisible in the electronic record. Standardized nursing language (SNL) is the vehicle to capture discrete nursing data. Until SNL is widely available and used, the impact of the nursing portion of NP practice will be unidentifiable for outcomes reporting. Opportunities to promote NP practice through SNL in EHRs are available at the national, state, and practice levels.