Knowledge Management in Healthcare

Knowledge management goes beyond data and information capture in computerized health records and ordering systems; it seeks to leverage the experiences of all who interact in healthcare to enhance care delivery, teamwork, and organizational learning. Knowledge management - if envisioned thoughtfully - takes a systemic approach to implementation that includes the embodiment of a learning culture. Knowledge is then used to support that culture and the knowledge workers within it to encourage them to share what they know, thusly enabling their peers, their organizations and ultimately their patients to benefit from their experience to proactively dismantle hierarchy and encourage sharing about what works, and what doesn’t to focus efforts on improvement. Knowledge Management in Healthcare draws on relevant business, clinical and health administration literature plus the analysis of discussions with a variety of clinical, administrative, leadership, patient and information experts. The result is a book that will inform thinking on knowledge access needs to mitigate potential failures, design lasting improvements and support the sharing of what is known to enable work towards attaining high reliability. It can be used as a general tool for leaders and individuals wishing to devise and implement a knowledge-sharing culture in their institution, design innovative activities supporting transparency and communication to strengthen existing programs intended to enhance knowledge sharing behaviours and contribute to high quality, safe care.

Lorri Zipperer, Cybrarian, is the principal at Zipperer Project Management in Albuquerque, NM. Lorri has been in the healthcare information and knowledge management field for two decades. She blogs, consults and teaches to engage multidisciplinary teams in creative thinking and innovation around knowledge sharing to support high quality, safe patient care. She has been honoured to explore knowledge management as a strategy for the acute care environment through a series of US government-funded workshop series and contribute to foundational publications to engage healthcare in implementing robust knowledge management programs. Her connection to the field of medical error reduction - from which the passion for this work stems - began in 1996 as a founding staff member of the US-based National Patient Safety Foundation. Lorri's knowledge management efforts focus on bringing multidisciplinary teams together to explore and enable effective knowledge transfer. Her commitment to understanding how systems thinking affects knowledge and information management culminated in several outputs to generate innovation and improvement in the melding of these disciplines. Ms. Zipperer was a 2004-2005 Patient Safety Leadership Fellow where she explored how information and knowledge transfer behaviors affect a learning culture. She has participated in research to explore the process of knowledge sharing both at the bedside and with clinical teams. In 2007 and 2009, she was funded by regional offices of the National Network of Libraries of medicine to work with her colleagues in acute care environments to facilitate avenues for implementation of knowledge sharing initiatives. In 2008, Ms Zipperer worked with the WHO Patient Safety to envision an effective knowledge sharing role for that organization. She has designed and co-facilitates a interprofessional workshop on knowledge sharing in hospitals. In addition, Ms Zipperer has recently contributed chapters on knowledge sharing work for medical librarians and systems thinking as a strategic development approach to a core library management publications both scheduled for publication in 2011. She is a published author in alternative roles for librarians, patient safety, medical reference, information management and visioning. She currently consults on information and knowledge management, publication and content creation, patient safety awareness and terminology development issues. Lorri earned her MA in library and information studies from Northern Illinois University. She has received honors from the library and information science community for her publishing work. In addition to her consultant commitments, she has served as an adjunct professor for library management at the university level. Lorri is also active professionally by filling both elected and invited positions within the Special Libraries Association.