Knowledge management strategies: Enhancing knowledge transfer to clinicians and patients.
At Intermountain Healthcare (Intermountain), executive clinical content experts are responsible for disseminating consistent evidence-based clinical content throughout the enterprise at the point-of-care. With a paper-based system it was difficult to ensure that current information was received and was being used in practice. With electronic information systems multiple applications were supplying similar, but different, vendor-licensed and locally-developed content. These issues influenced the consistency of clinical practice within the enterprise, jeopardized patient and clinician safety, and exposed the enterprise and its employees to potential financial penalties. In response to these issues Intermountain is developing a knowledge management infrastructure providing tools and services to support clinical content development, deployment, maintenance, and communication. The Intermountain knowledge management philosophy includes strategies guiding clinicians and consumers of health information to relevant best practice information with the intention of changing behaviors. This paper presents three case studies describing different information management problems identified within Intermountain, methods used to solve the problems, implementation challenges, and the current status of each project.
Roemer
Lorrie K
LK
Intermountain Healthcare, Salt Lake City, Utah 84120, USA. Lorrie.Roemer@Intermountainmail.org
Rocha
Roberto A
RA
Del Fiol
Guilherme
G
Bradshaw
Richard L
RL
Hanna
Timothy P
TP
Hulse
Nathan C
NC
D020000:Decision Support Systems, Clinical / Q000458:organization & administration*; D019317:Evidence-Based Medicine; D007061:Idaho; D008490:Medical Informatics; D019982:Organizational Case Studies; D019095:Point-of-Care Systems; D014584:User-Computer Interface; D014589:Utah