Big data-enabled nursing: education, research and practice

Historically, nursing, in all of its missions of research/scholarship, education and practice, has not had access to large patient databases.

Nursing consequently adopted qualitative methodologies with small sample sizes, clinical trials and lab research.

Historically, large data methods were limited to traditional biostatical analyses.

In America, large payer data has been amassed and structures/organisations have been created to welcome scientists to explore these large data to advance knowledge discovery.

Health systems electronic health records (EHRs) have now matured to generate massive databases with longitudinal trending.

This text reflects how the learning health system infrastructure is maturing, and being advanced by health information exchanges (HIEs) with multiple organisations blending their data, or enabling distributed computing.