The state of knowledge management in US hospitals - not great!

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I’m posting this as it looks at something not well addressed by our academic colleagues - but which I believe causes us a lot of pain in our everyday NZ healthcare lives.

Knowledge management refers to institutional / system knowledge - e.g. guidelines, policies, decisions, vision, etc. In other words, the useful supportive stuff that can be jolly hard to find when you need it at the coalface.

It is a report by a US-based vendor (C8 Health) on the state of knowledge management in US hospitals, surveying medical professionals. It highlights the importance of effective knowledge management in delivering high-quality care, and suggests that there is substantial room for improvement in the current state of knowledge management in hospitals. Furthermore, it concludes that the widespread ineffective systems and inconsistent documentation lead to suboptimal care and even patient injury and/or death.

The survey results suggest three major areas for improvement:

  1. document management
  2. search functionality
  3. interdepartmental accessibility.

C8Health_TheStateKnowledgeMgmtReport_FINAL-1.pdf (656.5 KB)

Do you think it would be similar here in NZ? What can we do to improve it?

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I have used … er, attempted to use … electronic health records from the USA to conduct real-world evaluation but sadly their records are wanting! I managed to get 400 useable records from 40,000

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Helpful report.
Highly applicable to primary care which has the widest scope of any speciality and the smallest budget for administration & ICT systems.
I remember when HeathPathways provided a huge leap forward here for me from a clinical decision support perspective.
Something specific to primary care - systems to quote charges of different services e.g. procedures. The funding is complex & changes often - making it a difficult area for knowledge management.