Pediatric Pain Management Knowledge Linkages: Mapping Experiential Knowledge to Explicit Knowledge

The goal of this project is to augment clinician communication by connecting it to evidence-based research, providing explicit knowledge to corroborate the experiential knowledge shared between health care practitioners. The source of tacit knowledge sharing is the Pediatric Pain Mailing List (PPML), a forum for practicing clinicians to contact peers on the subject of pain in children. The messages, dating back to 1993, are processed for pertinent information and gathered together into threads. They are then parsed and connected to a set of MeSH keywords, which is used to search Pubmed and return a set of papers that correspond to the subject being discussed. The results are presented in an online forum, providing clinicians with an arena in which they can browse the archives of the PPML and connect those conversations to pertinent medical literature.