Distributing knowledge maintenance for clinical decision-support systems: The "knowledge library" model

The maintenance of knowledge-rich clinical decision-support systems is challenging, in particular in the complex setting of a large academic medical center. Distributing the maintenance tasks to the source of expertise can address scalability, accuracy and currency issues. It also helps to foster a more global sense of ownership among the system users. The knowledge maintenance model must provide processes and tools to deal with a wide range of stakeholders (resident and attending physicians, consulting specialists, other care providers, case managers, ancillary departments), with knowledge embedded in legacy departmental systems, and with the continuous evolution of the content and form of the knowledge base. We describe and illustrate the "knowledge library" model in use at Vanderbilt University Medical Center for the distributed maintenance of the integrated knowledge base that drives the WizOrder clinical decision-support, physician order entry, and notes capture system.