title: Evaluating the appropriateness of a nurse expert system's patient assessment.
abstract: The Urological Nursing Information System (UNIS) is an expert-system prototype designed to help nurses perform patient assessments on elderly nursing home residents known to be incontinent of urine. A study was conducted to evaluate the appropriateness of the patient-assessment parameters stored in the knowledge base of UNIS. These parameters were stored as objects--a kind of template for holding related clusters of data, facts, rules, hypotheses, or any knowledge in a single conceptual unit. Each object was rated for its appropriateness by 14 nurse experts. Resulting scores ranged from +14 to -14. The effect of the nurse experts' educational backgrounds and work settings on their ratings were also analyzed. The results indicated that 95.6% of the objects received favorable ratings from the nurse experts. Educational background was not a significant factor chi 2 = 5.2, but work settings did have a significant affect chi 2 = 21.07, p = 0.01.
authors.affiliation: Department of Information Systems, University of Maryland, Baltimore.
authors.forename: K E
authors.initials: KE
authors.lastname: Petrucci
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Jacox
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: McCormick
authors.forename: P
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Parks
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Kjerulff
authors.forename: B
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Baldwin
authors.forename: P
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Petrucci
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D003936:Diagnosis, Computer-Assisted / Q000592:standards*; D005103:Expert Systems; D006801:Humans; D009730:Nursing Assessment / Q000592:standards*; D015403:Nursing Evaluation Research; D012986:Software Validation; D014549:Urinary Incontinence / Q000451:nursing*