The knowledge management system developed at Partners Health Care is a model for the way knowledge management (KM) systems should work. Partners Health Care, located in Boston, Massachusetts, is an umbrella organization which includes Brigham and Women’s Hospital, as well as several other hospitals and physicians’ groups. Partners has a KM system that not only works, but also saves lives and reduces costs at the same time. The trick that Partners found to make its KM system work is to embed knowledge into the normal work processes of physicians. Partners found this works better than trying to get busy physicians to make contributions and references to a knowledge repository as a separate stand-alone process.

The method Partners chose to embed KM into the work processes of its physicians was to focus on the physicians’ order entry system. Any time Partners physicians prescribe medications or order tests, they must enter the order into an IT system which not only accepts the order, but runs it against an integrated database of patients’ medical records and clinical knowledge. For example, if a physician enters an order for a particular drug, the KM system compares the order against the patient’s medical record to determine if there is a potential negative interaction with other medications he is taking or if the patient had an allergic reaction to that medication in the past. Or the system may check the order against the patient’s diagnosis and the clinical knowledge base and note that the medication order is an unusual one. If so, the physician is so advised and she can withdraw or change the order. On the other hand, the physician can override the system’s advice if her medical judgment tells her there is little risk.

Embedding a knowledge management system into the work process system of high-end professionals like physicians is a relatively new technique, but it could have payoffs for KM in other disciplines as well. In the case of Partners, studies so far show that its KM system reduced serious medication errors by 55 percent. As another example of the system’s value, when the clinical knowledge base was changed to include a new drug found to be particularly beneficial for heart patients, the drug was prescribed for 81 percent of patients, an increase from 12 percent.