Knowledge Artifacts as Bridges between Theory and Practice: The Clinical Pathway Case

This paper discusses the case of how Clinical Pathways (CPs) are defined, used and maintained in two hospital settings. We combine a literature review and observational study to illustrate the composite nature of CPs and the different roles they can play in different phases of their life-cycle, with respect to the theme of bridging medical knowledge with the related practices by which physicians deal with a specific care problem. We take the case of the CP as a paradigmatic case to make a point about the urging need of an integrated approach towards the computer-based support of information and knowledge management in rapidly evolving cooperative work settings. 1 Artifacts that Put Knowledge in Practice Knowledge is often operationally defined in terms of a meaningful collection of rules, principles, criteria and informative notions that enable people to interpret a given situation, make decisions, solve problems, communicate and cooperate. Rather than on knowledge itself (whatever it is), this approach leads to focusing on what is used when people have to do with some knowledge, i.e. on the physical artifacts that are created to somehow embed and reify the knowledge that is externalized for some particular purpose. Indeed, the concept of knowledge artifact (KA) has been introduced to undertake a whole series of studies on how to support knowledge, as well as its creation, sharing and management. That notwithstanding, knowledge artifacts are rarely studied “in action”. This is probably due to the fact that the concept of KA is rarely adopted as a first class concept to describe Cabitza and Simone Dipartimento di Informatica, Sistemistica e Comunicazione, Università degli Studi di MilanoBicocca cabitza,[email protected] Sarini Dipartimento di Psicologia, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca [email protected]