The Future of Healthcare Knowledge Sharing
“Patients should have access to a health care system in which health professionals share information, learn from each other, and hold themselves and one another accountable in order to generate the best medical outcome at the most reasonable cost for each patient.”
“Delivery System Reform,” November 4, 2008; A Joint Perspective from Intermountain Healthgroup, Kaiser Permanente, and Mayo Clinic
Healthcare organizations are under pressure, struggling to cope with rising costs and battling barriers to efficiency. At the same time, they're trying to deliver compelling value and improve patient care, outcomes and wellness.
Knowledge sharing is addressing these issues dead-on and transforming healthcare delivery. Organizations that embrace it are raising the quality and availability of care, increasing operational efficiency, and reducing healthcare costs.
This paper will look at knowledge gaps, discuss the future of healthcare knowledge sharing, examine what industry leaders are doing, and address concerns about using the Internet to distribute medical expertise.
The Knowledge Gap
A wealth of healthcare information, observations and wisdom resides on the Internet, and the latest web tools – forums, blogs, video, social networking, wikis, real-time collaboration – have enabled an exponential increase in content. The obstacles that limited knowledge sharing are gone. Anyone can publish, and consumer-generated content is pervasive. Specialty sites are expanding virally. The demand for knowledge seems insatiable.
However, there are barriers to accessing healthcare knowledge. Internet search results are disorganized, and it’s hard to find what we need. Life-saving data may be cloistered within an organization, or it simply isn’t recorded yet. The result is the knowledge gap, which is the inability to access the right information from the ...
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