Can Blogging Be Used To Improve Medication Error Collection As Part Of Health Informatics Knowledge Management?

Blogs (web logs) seem to be growing in popularity and are a phenomenon of the Internet. Could blogging be an innovative tool for knowledge management (KM)? This paper looks at the concept of using blogs to store and share knowledge about healthcare. A general research question is whether information systems (IS) incorporating intranet-based or restricted blogs might provide an innovative, user-friendly method for identifying and preventing medical errors. This research looks at ways to uncover explicit and tacit knowledge about human-system situated processes associated with nursing care in a hospital. Information concerning errors must to be uncovered without threatening healthcare professionals in terms of ethics, legal problems or job security. To conduct the research, a blog was established in a protected, anonymous-posting system and was provided as an interactive medium where novice nurses could share information and develop knowledge. The study provided proof of concept and showed that blogs can support communities of practice (CoP). Therefore, web-based sharing (blogs, wikis, and forums) might provide effective tools for discovering medical-errors. The collected information and data then could be used with analytical tools to create knowledge-based reports that improve procedures and provide quality assurance. Blog data was analyzed for information concerning procedures, errors, quality assurance, and job definitions. The research showed there are potential benefits in regularly using blogging tools in a medical environment (or other domains) as a framework for KM. Blogging can support sharing and reusing personal knowledge to improve applications, enterprises, and human-system environments.