Enhancing Knowledge Management in a Multi-Center Clinical Trial by a Web-Based Knowledge Medium

The healthcare industry is essentially knowledge based. The quality and efficiency of work performed in healthcare institutions depends on their ability to both manage internally created knowledge about patients, e.g., healing practices, and available expertise as well as to enrich and integrate it with relevant external knowledge created worldwide by related institutions (pharmacy research teams, international health organizations, etc.). Efficient management of knowledge in healthcare requires, therefore, concepts and solutions for management, cooperation, and sharing of knowledge within and between institutions (Greiner & Rose, 1997). Despite this fact, until now, knowledge management and processing techniques are mainly used in the form of isolated (e.g., expert) systems for very specific domains. The basic processes of knowledge generation and exchange across domains and locations are not supported by integrated information systems. Under the growing pressure on quality assurance and cost reduction, innovative concepts and technologies to support the management of knowledge are increasingly gaining attention from hospital workers, physicians, pharmacists, health insurance companies, and patients. Knowledge management is a systematic approach to improve the way organizations, groups, and individuals handle their knowledge in all forms, in order to improve their effectiveness, innovation and quality. This implies effective creation, capturing, sharing, and managing of knowledge. Several approaches and guidelines for organizing knowledge management (Probst, Steffen and Kai, 1997; Davenport 1998) and technologies, such as organizational memory (Stein and Zwass, 1994; Conklin, 1996) or document-management systems, have been developed in order to guide knowledge management projects and enable