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If we only knew what we know: principles for knowledge sharing across people, practices, and platforms

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Translational Behavioral Medicine

Abstract

The improvement of health outcomes for both individual patients and entire populations requires improvement in the array of structures that support decisions and activities by healthcare practitioners. Yet, many gaps remain in how even sophisticated healthcare organizations manage knowledge. Here we describe the value of a trans-institutional network for identifying and capturing how-to knowledge that contributes to improved outcomes. Organizing and sharing on-the-job experience would concentrate and organize the activities of individual practitioners and subject their rapid cycle improvement testing and refinement to a form of collective intelligence for subsequent diffusion back through the network. We use the existing Cancer Research Network as an example of how a loosely structured consortium of healthcare delivery organizations could create and grow an implementation registry to foster innovation and implementation success by communicating what works, how, and which practitioners are using each innovation. We focus on the principles and parameters that could be used as a basis for infrastructure design. As experiential knowledge from across institutions builds within such a system, the system could ultimately motivate rapid learning and adoption of best practices. Implications for research about healthcare IT, invention, and organizational learning are discussed.

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Acknowledgments

Preparation of the article was supported by Award Number CA-P20-137219 from the National Cancer Institute. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Cancer Institute or the National Institutes of Health.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Health Research, Kaiser Permanente Colorado, Denver, CO, USA

    James W Dearing PhD

  2. Group Health Research Institute, Group Health Cooperative, Seattle, WA, USA

    Sarah M Greene MPH

  3. Center for Health Research, Geisinger Health System, Danville, PA, USA

    Walter F Stewart PhD

  4. Center for Health Research, Kaiser Permanente Hawaii, Sol Alakawa St. #201, Honolulu, HI, 96817-5700, USA

    Andrew E Williams PhD

Authors
  1. James W Dearing PhD
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  2. Sarah M Greene MPH
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  3. Walter F Stewart PhD
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  4. Andrew E Williams PhD
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to James W Dearing PhD.

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Implications

Practice: The informal management and sharing of knowledge across healthcare organizations has the potential to accelerate and broaden improvements in care, service, and affordability if systems are designed and implemented for and largely by practitioners and trigger both their intrinsic and extrinsic motivations.

Policy: Building on established systems that already tie together healthcare organizations can shorten the time required to start up an inter-organizational Implementation Registry.

Research: Linking the analysis of how informal knowledge management and sharing systems function with staff and patient-level outcomes is a rich opportunity for health services and behavioral scientists.

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Dearing, J.W., Greene, S.M., Stewart, W.F. et al. If we only knew what we know: principles for knowledge sharing across people, practices, and platforms. Behav. Med. Pract. Policy Res. 1, 15–25 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13142-010-0012-0

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