Knowledge Integration is the key to providing effective and efficient health care service

The article, Just-in-Time Delivery Comes to Knowledge Management, brings up major issues regarding knowledge sharing and application. In a highly specialized application domain such as healthcare, both existence and usage of high-level expertise are crucial to the success of the healthcare system. While high-level expertise is typically owned by a small number of experts who develop their expertise through long years of practicing experience and learning, such expertise should be made available to and deployed by a relatively larger number of practicing physicians. It’s apparent that the availability of high-level expertise does not automatically means every physician gets to use it. Here is where KM technology can help tremendously.

A problem common to physicians is the great quantity of information and knowledge items. There are almost: 10,000 different diseases and syndromes, 3,000 medications, 1,100 lab ests, and many of the 400,000 articles added each year to the biomedical literature.

Partners HealthCare itself produces about 200 articles on hypertension, 139 on asthma, and 313 on diabetes. Lots of facts and information mean lots of knowledge is required to stay on top and know how to best match with the patients’ specific situation. This is overwhelming for left-alone physicians!

An effective treatment requires a perfect match among the characteristics in three categories: disease, medication, and patients. Doctors gather information about patients’ illness symptoms. Computer systems, especially database systems, record medication data and information, and experts know a lot about diseases. When these three categories of knowledge are properly integrated, only positive outcomes and no negative ones are produced.