Management of knowledge gaps: concept representation of things we don't know.
Suva (Swiss National Accident Insurance Fund) is the most important carrier of obligatory accident insurance in Switzerland. Its medical division supports doctors working in inpatient and outpatient care with comprehensive case management and with conciliar advice. The Suva hospitals provide inpatient rehabilitation. In 2002, Suva started the InWiM project. InWiM is an acronym and stands for "Integrierte Wissensbasen der Medizin", which can be translated as "Integrated Knowledge Bases in Medicine". Information retrieval within InWiM is achieved by means of the MeSH Index (Medical Subject Headings), the thesaurus of the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM). InWiM has now been extended towards the management not only of publications but also of areas where sound knowledge is missing, so called "knowledge gaps": Knowledge gaps are indexed with MeSH terms in a similar way to publications. This improves knowledge management: In particular it is possible to search and find knowledge gaps and solutions covering the same or a similar topic, thus allowing adequate collating and it prevents duplication of work. Furthermore, literature search strategies for the NML are predefined and do not need every time to be reinvented from scratch.
Bleuer
Juerg P
JP
Healthevidence GmbH, P.O. Box 6551, CH-3001 Berne, Switzerland. bleuer@healthevidence.ch
Talerico
Daniele
D
Bösch
Kurt
K
Lampérière
Vincent
V
Ludwig
Christian A
CA
D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods*; D019359:Knowledge; D046650:Medical Subject Headings; D013557:Switzerland; D014584:User-Computer Interface