Design of a Proposed Nursing Knowledge Portal

Nurses responsible for making strategic decisions in the hospital are tracking performance metrics that accurately measure how well the hospital is performing. These nurses are always looking for the appropriate strategies that can be combined with qualitative measures to respond just in time and accurately to clients. The information presented to strategic decision makers is used to monitor and analyse the performance of the hospital so that, when necessary, appropriate modifications can be made for the hospital to remain relevant to the community. Hence, information leveraged on demand in hospitals would enhance knowledge discovery with better content organization and management of patient and non-patient related information from multiple sources to assist nurses in their day-to-day work. In recent years, knowledge portals, as single-point-access software systems intended to provide easy and timely access to information and to support communities of knowledge workers who share common goals, have emerged as a key tool for supporting knowledge work. This article describes our experience in designing a proposed knowledge portal prototype for nurses at the Singapore General Hospital (SGH). A team of four postgraduate students from the Division of Information Studies at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) was formed to study the feasibility of implementing a knowledge portal for nurses (Chan, 2004; Girish, 2004; Jayakumaran, 2004; Liu, 2003), with the specific objectives identified: