Abstract
Suva (Swiss National Accident Insurance Fund) is the most important carrier of obligatory accident insurance in Switzerland. Its medical division initiated a knowledge management project called InWiM. “InWiM” is the acronym for “Integrierte Wissensbasen der Medizin” which can be translated as “Integrated Knowledge Bases in Medicine”. The project is part of an ISO 9001 certification program and comprises the definition and documentation of all processes in the field of knowledge management as well as the development of the underlying ITC infrastructure. The knowledge representation model used for the ICT implementation regards knowledge as a multidimensional network of interlinked units of information. The model allows annotations for a narrative description of the nature of the units of information (e.g. documents) and the cross-links as well. Information retrieval is achieved by means of a full implementation of the MeSH Index, the thesaurus of the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM). InWiM manages not only publications but also keeps track of “knowledge gaps”, i. e. areas where sound knowledge is missing. Knowledge gaps are indexed with MeSH terms in a similar way to publications. This improves knowledge management: In particular it is possible to search and find knowledge gaps and solutions covering the same or a similar topic, thus allowing adequate collating and it prevents duplication of work. Furthermore, literature search strategies for the NML are predefined and do not need every time to be reinvented from scratch.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank all the members of the project group for their work and valuable input: Klaus Bathke, Erich Bär, Viktor Bydzovsky, Fiorenzo Caranzano, Massimo Ermanni, Bruno Ettlin, Pius Feierabend, Roland Frey, Franziska Gebel, Carlo Gianella, Raphael Good, Ulrike Hoffmann-Richter, Roland Jäger, Sönke Johannes, Bertrand Kiener, Hans Kunz, Jürg Ludwig, Wolfgang Meier, Bettina Rosenthal, Jan Saner, Rita Schaumann-von Stosch, Felix Schlauri, Holger Schmidt, Fred Speck, Klaus Stutz, Benno Tobler, Felix Tschui, Walter Vogt.
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Bleuer, J.P., Talerico, D., Bösch, K., Lampérière, V., Ludwig, C.A. (2012). Knowledge Management: Often Neglected but Crucial to eHealth. In: Wickramasinghe, N., Bali, R., Suomi, R., Kirn, S. (eds) Critical Issues for the Development of Sustainable E-health Solutions. Healthcare Delivery in the Information Age. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-1536-7_13
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