Reusable Knowledge for Best Clinical Practices: Why We Have Difficulty Sharing and What We Can Do

A central challenge in clinical decision support is the difficulty
in creating shareable repositories of best practice knowledge.
A host of proprietary systems makes it difficult to have a wide-
ly accepted representation format. Different uses of knowledge
and contextualized, workflow-specific adaptations cause the
knowledge that is already in such site-specific formats to be
not readily usable by others. New or updated knowledge is
continually being generated. Where should such knowledge
reside, what format should it reside in, and how should it be
reviewed and disseminated? What are roles of knowledge pro-
viders? How does the “last mile” of adaptation to settings
and proprietary formats get accomplished? This panel seeks
to identify promising approaches to managing the lifecycle of
knowledge generation and refinement. The aims are to facili-
tate the transition of new knowledge to formal representation,
and the delivery of best practice knowledge in executable form
to different settings, where it can be adapted to improve care
processes and outcomes.