Knowledge repository online : an electronic knowledge development and maintenance process.

The amount of medical knowledge is ever growing. This growth is welcomed and hoped for as new and better information that can improve patient care becomes available. It does, however, have the potential to become overwhelming and unmanageable. This project began as an idea to improve the knowledge development and maintenance process. It was coupled with an idea for online order sets that met the need of physicians within Intermountain Health Care (IHC). After gathering concepts and elements from Knowledge Management (KM) and Configuration Management (CM) and reviewing the successes of similar research, analyses were performed on several processes of groups and individuals who develop and maintain knowledge content at IHC. Requirements were gathered and developed based on the analyses, the concepts from KM and CM, and the lessons learned from previous research. The requirements guided the development of the Knowledge Repository Online (KRO), an application that allows users to find and use knowledge content as well as to perform reviews on knowledge content. The application has been shown to be successful in clinical use as approximately 26% of the patient charts in two pilot sites contain order sets from KRO. There are over 500 documents that have been loaded into KRO for both clinical use and for review. These numbers suggest that the application can be used in the knowledge development and maintenance process and that clinicians can be effective in contributing knowledge content.