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The Integrated Knowledge Management Demonstration Projects

🌐 Overview​

Integrated Knowledge Management (IKM) represents the fusion of healthcare terminology knowledge resources under a unified representation framework. It brings together version control, standardized viewing, collaborative editing, and extension development within a collaborative environment, emphasizing building on existing work rather than starting from scratch.

🎯 Mission​

Our mission is to improve healthcare information through community collaboration and innovation, pushing forward the advancements in interoperability, clinical decision support, and patient outcomes.

🌟 Vision​

To ensure consistent and accurate representation of healthcare information at all times.

📜 History​

Background​

For decades, healthcare information has been on an evolutionary path, integrating new technologies, practices, and tools to enhance clinical care quality. However, as health information technology has proliferated, it has led to data silos and trust issues. IKM emerges as a solution, aiming to address these issues through a community-driven approach that unites all healthcare ecosystem stakeholders.

❗ Challenges​

  • Inability to Represent Statements Accurately: Often, clinical statements are presented in forms that make decision support unreliable and unsafe.

  • Inability to Determine Equivalence: The variation in terminologies and local code sets complicates the recognition of equivalent standards, introducing errors.

  • Inability to Consistently Represent Concepts: Rapid healthcare changes outpace the update capabilities of current standards organizations, leading to ambiguous concept representations.

  • Inability to Prevent Error: A lack of mechanisms for assessing terminology quality makes it challenging to avoid errors in clinical data.

  • Inability to Manage Change Over Time: Existing systems struggle to adapt safely and reliably to new technologies and policies.

The diversity in healthcare system configurations and the way information is collected, stored, managed, and exchanged complicates the integrity of patient information. Standards like RxNorm, LOINC®, SNOMED CT®, and more aim to achieve unambiguous data exchange or interoperability.

💡 Solutions​

Integrated Knowledge Management champions a community movement to enhance healthcare data quality and integration. A cornerstone of this initiative is Komet, an open-source tool designed to standardize healthcare data standards, boost clinical decision support, and improve patient outcomes, propelled by collaborative efforts among healthcare industry stakeholders.

🚀 Komet Overview​

Komet is at the forefront, striving to harmonize disparate terminologies and develop a common model to foster interoperable data, addressing the core challenges identified.

“In order to prevent fragmented care by consulting medical specialists, primary care physicians are challenged with needing an influx of information to deliver the best care and make informed clinical decisions. With interoperable data, redundant tasks, like reentering patient information, where human errors can occur would no longer be an issue and data could be easily shared between systems. After witnessing endless outcomes that resulted in patient harm and inefficiencies within the healthcare ecosystem, the idea of Komet was born.” - Keith E. Campbell, MD, PhD

Komet represents a platform that aims to unify different terminologies, enhancing the interoperability of data and thereby improving healthcare delivery and patient outcomes.