The clinical evaluation of UNIS: an expert system for the long-term care of patients with urinary incontinence

The effects of UNIS (urological nursing information system), a nurse expert system prototype, on the nursing care of elderly patients with urinary incontinence in a nursing home are determined. UNIS was designed to facilitate knowledge transfer of urinary incontinence to users and to advise nurse users on how to assess and manage the incontinent patients. UNIS was installed on two nursing units for ten weeks and the amount of user support was varied. A third nursing unit served as a control unit. Patients were matched according to their cognitive function and randomly assigned to one of three treatment groups. The wet occurrences of each patient were measured during the day and evening. Nurses´ knowledge of urinary incontinence was measured on four separate occasions. All subjects served as their own control. Analysis-of-variance procedures were used to analyze the data. Installing UNIS significantly reduced the number of wet occurrences of a ten-week period