Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
What is knowledge management in the health field?
You may be wondering, what in the world is knowledge management anyway? Here are some definitions posted on a Johns Hopkins website (see http://www.infoforhealth.org/km/km.shtml ):
"Knowledge management involves systematically and routinely creating, gathering, organizing, sharing, adapting and using knowledge - from both inside and outside an organization - to help achieve organizational goals and objectives (Milton, 2002)."
"Put more simply, knowledge management gets the right knowledge to the right people at the right time so they can work more effectively (APQC, 2003)."
If you've communicated on the Internet for a while, you may have encountered the acronym: RTFM. Someone posts a question to a discussion list, and someone else answers "RTFM." The "clean" definition is "Read The Fine Manual." But a knowledge management approach would say that's not necessarily the best answer -- forcing a manual down someone's throat, necessitating them to wade through pages of text that do not apply to their need and may even be outdated. The best answer may in fact reside in someone's head -- an expert who works in the cutting edge of a field. Or it might reside in a 140-character post on Twitter that serves as a helpful tip. Just-in-time knowledge is one of the goals of knowledge management -- getting the answers we need to work effectively, just when we need them.
With the rapid rate of change in scientific fields such as health, effective knowledge management is all the more important in providing the best, up-to-date service to health clients. Tapping into tacit knowledge -- the knowledge in the heads of experts -- is crucial.
While working on the INFO Project at the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs, I was fascinated by one initiative to capture the tacit knowledge of healthcare service providers in developing countries. Project staff had polled providers around the world through e-mail and asked them to contribute their most effective counseling messages related to questions clients may have about various reproductive health topics, such as contraceptives. Contributed messages ended up in a searcheable database. Other healthcare experts reviewed the counseling messages to ensure medical accuracy. I've since left the project, but thought this to be a wonderful effort to help providers share their "what works" knowledge.
The need for effective knowledge management in healthcare goes beyond providing the best care. A recent article by Nancy Davis Kho on KNWorld.com (http://is.gd/1yBMO), relates the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which includes $19.2 billion in funding for healthcare information technology, to the challenge for the knowledge management field to come up with solutions that both improve healthcare outcomes and lower costs.
However you look at it, it's a timely challenge for the global healthcare community.
"Knowledge management involves systematically and routinely creating, gathering, organizing, sharing, adapting and using knowledge - from both inside and outside an organization - to help achieve organizational goals and objectives (Milton, 2002)."
"Put more simply, knowledge management gets the right knowledge to the right people at the right time so they can work more effectively (APQC, 2003)."
If you've communicated on the Internet for a while, you may have encountered the acronym: RTFM. Someone posts a question to a discussion list, and someone else answers "RTFM." The "clean" definition is "Read The Fine Manual." But a knowledge management approach would say that's not necessarily the best answer -- forcing a manual down someone's throat, necessitating them to wade through pages of text that do not apply to their need and may even be outdated. The best answer may in fact reside in someone's head -- an expert who works in the cutting edge of a field. Or it might reside in a 140-character post on Twitter that serves as a helpful tip. Just-in-time knowledge is one of the goals of knowledge management -- getting the answers we need to work effectively, just when we need them.
With the rapid rate of change in scientific fields such as health, effective knowledge management is all the more important in providing the best, up-to-date service to health clients. Tapping into tacit knowledge -- the knowledge in the heads of experts -- is crucial.
While working on the INFO Project at the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs, I was fascinated by one initiative to capture the tacit knowledge of healthcare service providers in developing countries. Project staff had polled providers around the world through e-mail and asked them to contribute their most effective counseling messages related to questions clients may have about various reproductive health topics, such as contraceptives. Contributed messages ended up in a searcheable database. Other healthcare experts reviewed the counseling messages to ensure medical accuracy. I've since left the project, but thought this to be a wonderful effort to help providers share their "what works" knowledge.
The need for effective knowledge management in healthcare goes beyond providing the best care. A recent article by Nancy Davis Kho on KNWorld.com (http://is.gd/1yBMO), relates the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which includes $19.2 billion in funding for healthcare information technology, to the challenge for the knowledge management field to come up with solutions that both improve healthcare outcomes and lower costs.
However you look at it, it's a timely challenge for the global healthcare community.
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