2018 Nursing Knowledge Big Data Science Initiative.

O n June 13–15, 2018, inMinneapolis, we witnessed the sixth annual Nursing Knowledge: Big Data Science (NKBD) conference. Just as the original 2013 invitational initiative that attracted nursing professionals from across practice, government policy, software vendors, professional organizations, informatics, academia, and research, 2018's NKBD open conference showed the same diversity as well as growth in numbers. The NKBD Initiative's core mission across these 6 years has stayed the same: to develop a roadmap for achieving “sharable and comparable” nursing data and to ensure the timely adoption of big data methodologies across all of nursing's domains. The 2018 conference kicked off with a powerful set of preconference workshops addressing key work group areas of high-value topics. This year's topics were Hands-On, Full Life Cycle Data Science; Social Media and Mobile Health Analytics; and Streamlining/Transforming EHR Documentation. Conducted so that participants can do hands-on work with new tools or demonstration case studies that give “how to” information, these 3-day–long sessions were jam-packed. The preworkshop evaluations rated the applied learning value of all three sessions as “very high,” with requests for more of the same going forward. The structure of the NKBD conference is primarily to provide a platform for the 10 working groups to report on their accomplishments over the past year. This year's reports demonstrated the considerable evolution that has occurred over these past 6 years and the significant body of work completed and breadth of accomplishments achieved from the 10 working groups. A list of some of the publications generated across the working groups is attached at the end of this article, and a full review is included in conference proceedings. The breadth of the work spans terminology standardization work under Matney/Settergren et al; data analytics and information modeling, Sylvia/Westra et al; nursing value, Welton/ Harper et al; and nursing informatics curriculum standards and resources, Wilson/Manos et al, to list just a few. During the body of the main conference, time allowed working groups to do on-the-ground work, as well as networking and collaborations with other work groups. In a summary session on the afternoon of the last day, work group chairs reported on their go-forward strategies, and this detail can be reviewed in the Resource Center site and conference proceedings.