A Knowledge Management Framework to Operationalize Experiential Knowledge: Mapping Tacit Medical Knowledge with Explicit Practice Guidelines

Apart from traditional sources of medical knowledge found in the form of published evidence, other modality of knowledge like tacit form of knowledge is equally vital for clinical decision making. In this concept paper, we present a knowledge management framework which extracts tacit knowledge from past cases stored in a Case base and uses it with explicit knowledge stored in Clinical Practice Guidelines. The novelty of this model is that it uses the explicit knowledge acquired from scientific research in tandem with experiential knowledge found in past cases thus linking/mapping the two modalities of knowledge. Here we present the system design of the proposed work which will illustrate the functionality of the knowledge management framework.