Medical vs. Nursing Informatics - Part 3 (final)

Here is the final part of the comparison between medical and nursing informatics. Part 1 and Part 2 can be found here.

Medical and Nursing Vocabularies:

Number of medical vocabularies such as MeSH, SNOMED, LOINC have been developed over the years. 100+ separate controlled vocabularies were conceptually linked in 1986 to form a meta-thesaurus called the UMLS (Unified Medical Language System).

Some nursing products such as CINAHL (Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature) use a medical vocabulary MeSH as an underlying vocabulary for diseases, drugs, anatomy, and physiology, and have expanded the vocabulary to include unique nursing terms in the vocabulary http://www.universityhealthsystem.com/Research/docs/Searching%20sEBSCO%20CINAHL.pdf

Growth opportunities: Lastly, both medical and nursing informatics domains are ripe for innovation and improvement. Consider the emerging health care models such as Patient Centered Medical Home that are likely to impact the physicians and nursing professions, in addition to impacting the related informatics domains as well.