Clinical Knowledge Manager
The Clinical Knowledge Manager (CKM) is a collaborative online portal that is effectively a 'one stop shop' for clinical knowledge specifications for clinicians, jurisdictions and vendors alike.
Using CKM clinicians are able to drive EHR content standardisation, to shape EHR content to support their needs for clinical care delivery, for health information exchange, data aggregation and analysis, and to support knowledge-enabled activities such as clinical decision support.
CKM is made up of 3 major components:
- A library of clinical models - archetypes, templates and terminology reference sets. Plus derived assets such as CDA fragments.
- A clinical and stakeholder collaboration process that supports governance of the lifecycle of clinical models - from drafts through to agreed and approved models ready for use in EHRs
- A governance and maintenance process for managing all clinical knowledge artefacts to support vendor implementation via release sets and documentation packages.
The Clinical Knowledge Manager is being openly and actively used by clinicians and other stakeholders include:
- openEHR Foundation - www.openEHR.org/knowledge/
- National eHealth Transition Authority, Australia - dcm.nehta.org.au/ckm/
- Sweden and Singapore have a national CKM repository, managed by their respective Ministries of Health, and Slovakia has an academic instance.
Clinicians view the clinical models in non-technical formats - tables, trees or mindmaps - whilst the underlying Archetype Definition Language is available for download and consumption by developers and vendors.
The Model review process is comprehensive and transparent to registered users. Reviewers who 'adopt' an archetype are invited to formal model reviews per clinical concept. Editors respond to all comments by reviewers, and the actions taken to evolve the model are documented.
The Audit trail ensures a full provenance of each and every model, including generation of differentials between versions to ensure accurate generation of Change logs for implementers.
All semantic validation (including on archetypes and templates) is carried out by tools within CKM.
Archetypes, templates and other resources are classifed under a formal ontology allowing users to query the entire repository based on a topic of interest.
CKM provides a strong foundation for any enterprise seeking interoperability between disparate EHR systems. For new vendors it is a great resource of established and approved EHR content. For existing vendors it provides a roadmap to which they can gradually convert proprietary content to approved and validated content.
Let's stop reinventing the clinical content wheel!