teaching us the fine art of charting patient care? With the nation engaged in debate over health care reform, it's important for nurses to define our contributions. Using standardized nursing languages, we can develop a unified approach to demonstrating nurses' contributions to patient outcomes. In 1997, an innovative project set out to incorporate three of these languages into a computerized system in three hospitals. The project, initiated by Immanuel St. Joseph's (ISJ), in Mankato, Minnesota, used the North American Nursing Diagnosis Association (NANDA) nomenclature, Nursing Interventions Classification (NIC), and Nursing Outcomes Classification (NOC) as a basis of the new system. NANDA, approved for the diagnosis of actual or potential health problems, contains 149 diagnoses, each including a label, a definition, and major