VistA Nursing System

VistA Nursing System
The Nursing application is just one of the many modules of the open source or public domain Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) VistA health information system. Nursing is comprised of multiple components - i.e., Administration, Education, Clinical Care, and Quality Assurance. In general, the Nursing system can be used to:

• Plan and document nursing care provided to the veteran patient.
• Support nursing administration by providing information needed for nursing organizational and staffing decisions.
• Provide and summarize data used for quality assurance and performance improvement purposes.
• Provide aggregate data and/or information for various nursing research endeavors.
• Support nurse educators by providing data/information for the tracking of mandatory
• programs and staff education.
• Generate daily, monthly, quarterly, and yearly management and statistical reports.

Clinical Functionality:
• Contains a patient classification system which generates reports by hospital bed section and ward.
• Includes nationally developed standard nursing care plans for initiating patient care plan generation.
• Allows nurses to generate a patient care plan based on patient problems, identified goals, and specified nursing interventions.
• Allows a staff nurse to update a patient's nursing ward location or bed section to insure accurate patient classification entries.
• Allows users to enter vital signs, height, and weight for patients.
• Allows users to generate Intake and Output reports, an End of Shift Report, and a Health Summary Report by patient or ward.

For more detail on the system, download the user manuals for the VistA Nursing system at http://www.va.gov/vdl/application.asp?appid=80