Sunday, September 8, 2013

Journal Entry 6

                 Rita Truex Module 6 

This week’s discussion questions regarding knowledge management tools had me thinking of ways to implement a fairly simple solution to the vexing problem of gathering and sharing knowledge among field based clinicians. As home health and hospice nurses are rarely in the same place at any given time and must meet productivity standards, it can be difficult to create a knowledge management system in our practice environment. For example, we have a wound care certified nurse, but he has his own caseload of patients and is rarely consulted when there is a need for his expertise. Looking at this whitepaper which was posted on Slideshare, a wiki may be a simple and affordable solution to that problem.  It is possible that a knowledge repository could be maintained by our IT and staff development departments with the expertise of those nurses who are consulted to share their knowledge while other nurses may add questions or updates of their own.

According to Webworks (2009), a wiki is a web based collaborative authoring tool that can link topic pages and can be used from any web browser. Wikis require very little computer authoring skills on the part of the authors. A wiki is not created  for casual users, it is intended as a space where the authors (subject matter experts and knowledge holders) continually change, create and collaborate, forming associations among material (pages) which in turn creates a searchable database.

A wiki may be an ideal knowledge management tool as it can be accessed from the field users’ laptops, a desktop, or a smartphone. The effect on practice for home health and hospice nurses would be to put the knowledge of the subject matter expert nurse in the hands of the nurse that needs it, at the time it is needed, which is critical to knowledge being useful.


References

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