Reusable Knowledge for Best Clinical Practices: Why We Have Difficulty Sharing and What We Can Do

and Objective A central challenge in clinical decision support is the difficulty in creating shareable repositories of best practice knowledge. A host of proprietary systems makes it difficult to have a widely accepted representation format. Different uses of knowledge and contextualized, workflow-specific adaptations cause the knowledge that is already in such site-specific formats to be not readily usable by others. New or updated knowledge is continually being generated. Where should such knowledge reside, what format should it reside in, and how should it be reviewed and disseminated? What are roles of knowledge providers? How does the “last mile” of adaptation to settings and proprietary formats get accomplished? This panel seeks to identify promising approaches to managing the lifecycle of knowledge generation and refinement. The aims are to facilitate the transition of new knowledge to formal representation, and the delivery of best practice knowledge in executable form to different settings, where it can be adapted to improve care processes and outcomes. Learning objectives: (1) Recognize the new and emerging methodologies for knowledge representation and knowledge management. (2) Explain the life cycle of knowledge generation/ refinement/deployment/value delivery. (3) Recognize the challenges in adaptation and widespread use.