Healthcare organizations handle an enormous amount of patient data, medical research, regulatory information and other documentation that’s critical for providing high-quality care. Effectively storing, organizing and retrieving this knowledge is essential, but it can be challenging without the right systems in place. This is where knowledge management (KM) comes in. KM systems help healthcare institutions manage information so it can be leveraged to boost efficiency, fuel innovation, improve decision-making and enhance patient outcomes.
Creatives On Call, an industry-leading marketing and creative consultancy, partners with healthcare organizations to help plan, develop and implement knowledge management systems. With niche experts in areas like patient experience, learning design and health information technology (IT), we can assemble the perfect team to ensure your KM system solves the right problems.
Why Are Knowledge Management Systems Necessary in Healthcare?
Healthcare produces vast amounts of data. There’s also a considerable amount of regulatory, compliance and operational information hospitals and clinics must manage. Accessing the right information when it’s needed is critical for providing effective care and running an efficient organization.
However, important information in healthcare organizations is often:
- Fragmented across multiple systems and databases.
- Buried in outdated paperwork and file cabinets.
- Scattered across different departments and facilities.
This makes it difficult for healthcare workers to find the data they need to make critical decisions. Without the ability to reliably access information, mistakes can happen and patient care suffers. Difficulty accessing organizational knowledge also hampers efficiency and innovation.
Knowledge management platforms consolidate information from disparate systems into a unified, cloud-based solution. They use artificial intelligence (AI) and automation to structure, categorize and link related data together. This connects the dots between information living in silos, which reveals key insights that can transform decision-making and healthcare delivery.
How KM Is Used in the Healthcare Sector
Healthcare institutions leverage knowledge management principles to:
- Improve clinical decision support: Clinical knowledge management platforms integrate information from electronic health records (EHRs), medical research, drug databases, regulatory guidance and more to provide real-time decision support for clinicians. This augments physician expertise with additional data to enhance diagnoses and treatment planning.
- Boost efficiency: By breaking down data silos, knowledge management systems can improve productivity by up to 15% and cut support costs by 20–40%. This eliminates redundant procedures, reduces mistakes from using outdated info and minimizes unnecessarily repeating past work. Additionally, implementing a knowledge management system is generally more cost-effective than overhauling current systems, leading to increased long-term savings of around 20–30%.
- Enhance training: Healthcare knowledge platforms support on-the-job training and ongoing education by providing easy access to the latest medical research, new clinical protocols, device operating procedures and techniques for various treatments.
- Strengthen patient experience: Patient portals connected to knowledge management systems enable consumers to access their personal health records from home. This empowers patients and improves communication with their healthcare providers.
- Promote collaboration & continuity of care: Clinicians at different facilities can access the same patient information to coordinate treatments across visits. This provides complete health histories that facilitate collaboration between healthcare professionals.
Creatives On Call’s specialized knowledge management consulting directors can help healthcare organizations refine existing knowledge platforms. Our experts facilitate optimized systems to further goals around improved decision support, enhanced efficiency, better training, strengthened patient engagement and increased care coordination.
What Are the Components of a Knowledge Management System in Healthcare?
Healthcare knowledge management solutions include a mix of technology platforms that enable aggregating, organizing, storing and disseminating information across the institution. By integrating core elements together into a cohesive architecture, KM systems structure disconnected information from EHRs, medical devices, research libraries, insurance claims systems and more around relationships. This reveals valuable linkages while still providing quick access to every data point.
Key Components of a Healthcare KM System
A robust healthcare knowledge management solution includes:
- Databases: Aggregating and interconnecting structured and unstructured data from across the health system into a centralized architecture.
- Taxonomies: Using AI and human oversight to apply descriptive tags and metadata to content flowing into the system. This enriches discoverability based on relationships.
- Search: Intuitive keyword and contextual search functionality to query connected databases and return relevant results. This relies on content taxonomies and underlying semantic links between information.
- Dashboards & reporting: Interactive data visualizations to provide at-a-glance views of trends and key performance indicators (KPIs). This assists data-driven decision-making across operations, finances, quality and patient care.
- Collaboration: Secure tools to discuss insights from the system and share documentation, which bolsters continuity of care across sites. This also fuels innovation through expertise exchange.
Connecting these typically disconnected systems together via a healthcare knowledge platform streamlines information access to augment human analysis with machine intelligence. This empowers every healthcare worker with the complete, up-to-date organizational knowledge needed to enhance decision-making.
How Knowledge Management Systems Can Boost Efficiency
By unlocking siloed information across disparate systems, knowledge management platforms prevent workflow redundancies that waste clinician time and organizational resources.
Common Healthcare Inefficiencies
- Repeating expensive medical tests when records are unavailable
- Manual searches for policies, procedures, codes and supporting documentation
- Duplicate data entry across multiple systems
- Scouring stacks of paperwork to piece together patient histories
- Inability to compile real-world evidence for innovations and investments
KM systems automatically assemble related clinical, operational and financial documentation around patients, providers, conditions and episodes of care. This enables the immediate access of complete histories to inform decisions. Process automation, alerts for the next best actions, and AI assistance further optimize productivity.
Creatives On Call can help healthcare IT and KM leaders design user interfaces (UIs), integrations and taxonomies that specifically target top areas of friction that stakeholders identify. Our empathy research techniques uncover the root causes of headaches while data analysis quantifies problems. This builds the business case for change to secure leadership investment. Ongoing performance dashboards then track efficiency gains from addressing pain points with the knowledge platform.
Read our guide on healthcare UI/UX design.
How Knowledge Management Systems Can Improve Decision-Making
Unifying siloed data for easy access provides healthcare workers with a more holistic view of patients and the organization. This improves all types of decisions:
- Clinical care choices: Complete health histories derived from integrated claims and pharmacy, hospital and wearable data produce better assessments and treatment plans. Real-time support tools at the point of care further optimize physician decisions.
- Operational process decisions: Data visualization dashboards help managers enhance workflows, staffing models and facility utilization based on trends that aggregated data and analytics reveal.
- Business strategy decisions: Combining financial statistics, competitive benchmarking and patient outcome metrics from a unified platform provides accurate situational awareness. Leaders can spot opportunities to capture market share and adjust tactics based on real-world evidence.
The Benefits of KM Systems for Clinical Decision Support
Clinical KM platforms leverage AI assistance, workflows optimized with real-world data, rich media and protocols to guide clinician choices at the point of care. This augments practitioner know-how with additional evidence-based guidance to enhance diagnoses and treatment plans.
Such tools increase adherence to continuously updated best practice standards derived from the latest medical research. This prevents reliance on outdated legacy processes that can delay life-saving interventions.
How Knowledge Management Systems Improve Healthcare Information Access
Finding precise information when it’s required is one of the biggest challenges for healthcare organizations, yet fast access to reliable data is imperative for delivering quality care while also running efficient operations. Silos that prevent resources from flowing between storage vaults and point-of-use locations create bottlenecks that hamper efficiency across hospitals and clinics.
The Importance of Accessible & Reliable Healthcare Information
Incorrect or outdated data lacks the full context required for optimal decision-making and can have dire consequences for patients. Missing just one critical piece of information at the wrong time — a special patient need, the latest protocol adjustment or a newly discovered condition — can be catastrophic. This makes fast access to complete, current and accurate medical information essential.
By merging related clinical, operational and financial documentation into a single searchable platform, knowledge management systems eliminate data silos. Content categorization applied by AI also enriches findability based on contextual relationships versus simply matching keywords. This empowers every healthcare worker with specific information required at the point of need while still retaining access to the complete collection of institutional knowledge.
Improving Data Access and Continuity of Care With KM Systems
Well-designed knowledge platforms enhance the accessibility and reliability of patient information to improve coordination and outcomes:
- Longitudinal health records: Patient data integrated from EHRs, claims systems, clinical research and wearables creates comprehensive profiles that persist over time. This full context aids diagnoses, lowers repeat testing, prevents medication conflicts and enables better care coordination between sites.
- Real-time data feeds: Constant info streams from connected medical equipment, supply chain systems and healthcare apps keep decision-making tied to the latest environmental conditions versus outdated snapshots. This allows for the adjustment of operational plans and patient interventions based on changes.
- Automated monitoring: Configurable rules watch for trends in vitals, treatment efficacy measures, population health markers and utilization metrics. Alerts notify care teams to potential dips that require early intervention to avoid complications.
Creatives On Call can help design knowledge management systems that seamlessly integrate patient data from across various healthcare IT systems to power comprehensive health records, real-time monitoring and flexible automated alerts. Our integration specialists excel at securely and reliably connecting data flows to aid care coordination and continuity.
The Role of Knowledge Management Systems in Enhancing Healthcare Interoperability
The ability to securely share patient information between specialty sites and disparate provider platforms fosters collaboration between care teams to improve outcomes. However, many legacy healthcare IT systems still lack interoperability.
Knowledge management solutions excel at linking related concepts across datasets. Interlinking heterogeneous systems on the back end enables the seamless disclosure of required data points from any application to end users on the front end. Mapping relationships between information across departments and diagnostic applications enhances information flows to augment interoperability. This also extends value from past technology investments versus completely replacing them.
Creatives On Call helps healthcare IT leaders design open knowledge platforms that leverage application programming interfaces (APIs) and Health Level Seven (HL7) standards to connect both modern cloud-based apps as well as entrenched on-premise systems. This allows for the secure exchange of patient data while avoiding high costs that might otherwise delay projects for budget reasons. Our tailored integration roadmaps balance new platforms and interfaces with existing infrastructures to provide interoperability on a budget based on overall ecosystem connectivity goals. Ongoing support then ensures adaptable enterprise architectures that simplify exchanging information across the health grid.
How Can Healthcare Institutions Effectively Implement Knowledge Management?
Undergoing large-scale IT systems implementation requires meticulous planning and skillful change management to stick the landing at go-live without disrupting hospital operations or patient care. Institutional knowledge management poses even greater challenges due to complex integrations and a cultural shift. Following best practices for each project phase is key to success:
- Planning: Reach alignment across clinical and administrative stakeholders on vision, goals, metrics and governance. Conduct capability analyses, balancing user needs with technical constraints. Ensure KM platforms and interfaces align with healthcare brand guidelines around visual identity, voice and tone, etc.
- Development: Conduct empathy discovery to map current-state decision journeys before designing future-state workflows enabled by the knowledge platform. Address cultural barriers to adopting evidence-based guidance.
- Deployment: Mitigate go-live risk through extensive integration testing, training programs that clearly communicate user benefits, and strong help desk support for the first 6 months.
- Evaluation: Incorporate behavioral science techniques into platform interactions to foster ongoing user engagement long after the initial launch. Study usage analytics to target potential problems. Deliver ongoing training to support user growth and gather continuous feedback via contextual surveys to drive rapid iteration cycles for continuous optimization.
With vast expertise in patient empathy mapping, data integration, learning design and designing AI assistance into complex platforms, Creatives On Call’s tailored teams excel in knowledge management implementations. Our on-demand model also provides flexible support that scales to needs without overburdening budgets. Strong healthcare focus facilitates understanding unique clinical challenges, data sensitivity constraints and specialized use cases.
The Challenges of Implementing KM Systems and How To Overcome Them
Effectively planning and implementing enterprise knowledge management systems poses formidable challenges, such as:
- Achieving consensus on platform requirements across different users and departments
- Accurately mapping all systems and data sources to connect
- Sequencing integrations based on value and interdependencies
- Developing taxonomies and metadata models and configuring AI engines for precise content categorization
- Creating adoption campaigns that effectively communicate user benefits and provide engaging training
- Updating protocols to leverage the system for better decision-making
- Continuously optimizing system performance based on user feedback
With niche expertise across IT, AI, change management and KM systems, Creatives On Call can handle these complexities. Our tailored teams work closely with internal stakeholders to ensure KM solutions solve top business priorities. Ongoing support also facilitates user adoption to maximize return on investment (ROI). Our specialists have a strong healthcare focus, which facilitates understanding unique clinical challenges, data sensitivity constraints and specialized use cases.
How Creatives On Call Can Help
Knowledge management empowers healthcare in ways that touch every corner of provider organizations. Effectively harnessing these benefits requires skillfully navigating medical data intricacies, complex system landscapes, entrenched legacy processes and skeptical users resistant to change.
As an industry-leading marketing and creative consultancy, Creatives On Call guides clients through the entire lifecycle, from identifying knowledge gaps that limit growth to designing intelligent solutions that get adopted across the institution for maximum impact. Our tailored on-demand teams integrate niche expertise in:
Healthcare journeys
Data science
Systems integration
Change management
This integrated approach breaks down barriers to quickly demonstrate how unlocking enterprise knowledge drives better choices for better outcomes. Our digital marketing strategy for healthcare includes search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC), email campaigns and web design to help reinforce and amplify knowledge-sharing initiatives through effective patient outreach and education programs. This ensures the entire healthcare ecosystem realizes the patient care and efficiency gains accessible through thoughtfully applied knowledge management.
CTA: Contact us today to learn more about realizing patient care, operational efficiency and financial advantages accessible through thoughtfully applied knowledge management.
Frequently Asked Questions
What types of data are collected in a healthcare knowledge base?
These systems connect patient medical records, insurance claims data, clinical trial research, regulatory guidance, drug information, proprietary hospital datasets and healthcare news/research feeds.
How can a knowledge base improve collaboration?
KM software often includes forums for securely exchanging insights across departments, documenting best practices/policies and notifying staff of procedure updates. This enhances coordination.
How do hospitals implement new KM platforms?
Follow a structured process. Plan stakeholder involvement, design future workflows, comprehensively map all data feeds, govern taxonomies and craft training to support users.
