Information Systems and Health Care IX: Accessing Tacit Knowledge and Linking It to the Peer-Reviewed Literature

Clinical decision-making can be improved if healthcare practitioners are able to leverage both the tacit and explicit modalities of healthcare knowledge, yet at present there do not exist knowledge management systems that support any active and direct mapping between these two knowledge modalities. In this paper, we present a healthcare knowledge-mapping framework that maps (a) the tacit knowledge captured in terms of email-based discussions between pediatric pain practitioners through a Pediatric Pain Mailing List (PPML), to (b) explicit knowledge represented in terms of peer-reviewed healthcare literature available at PubMed. We report our knowledge mapping strategy that involves methods to establish discussion threads, organize the discussion threads in terms of topic-specific taxonomy, formulate an optimal search query based on the content of a discussion thread, submit the search query to PubMed and finally to retrieve and present the search results to the user.