Despite an unprecedented amount of health-related data being amassed from various technological innovations, our ability to process this data and extract hidden knowledge has yet to catch up with this explosive growth. Although nursing care plans can be an effective tool to support the achievement of desired patient outcomes, their online collection, storage, and processing is lagging far behind. As a result, the impact of nursing care is not well understood from qualitative as well as quantitative perspectives. In this article, we first outline a complete life cycle of nursing care data, and present a knowledge discovery and analysis framework for such data sets. We also highlight Big Data issues pertaining to the analysis of nursing care data. Using an exemplar data set, we demonstrate the broad applicability of the proposed framework by showing knowledge discovery results for different outcomes related to patients, nursing staff, and administrators.