Testimony Vocabulary Task Force, Standards Committee, Office of the National Coordinator.

INTRODUCTION Good morning, as co-Chair for the Alliance for Nursing Informatics (ANI), I am pleased to provide testimony on nursing vocabularies. ANI believes that patient centric interdisciplinary care is required to effectively improve health care quality, safety and efficiency. Nurses are at the center of care coordination and technology should be an enabler, enhancing the communication between care providers throughout the continuum of care. Nursing data overlaps other health care disciplines, but also has unique phenomena represented by nursing vocabularies. Therefore, nursing terminologies and data sets are essential to meaningful use of electronic health records (EHRs), not only for provision of care but also reuse of data for quality improvement and research.