The Healthcare Management Council, Inc. Delivering Cost and Quality Benchmarks for your Hospital organization.

KnowledgeWeb offers over 8,000 solutions

The KnowledgeWeb expands and changes with clients’ needs

NEEDHAM, MASS. – September 24, 2010 – The Healthcare Management Council, Inc. this month has marked the addition of the 8,550^th solution to its KnowledgeWeb portal.

While HMC is the leading provider of actionable benchmarks and dashboards, it offers clients even more. It delivers an online platform of easily searched solutions to the challenges its analytical applications define. It doesn’t just identify such things as excess and off-quality events – it provides easy-to-follow steps to solve them. With healthcare reform, technological advances, and a myriad of other changes afoot in the healthcare industry, hospital administrators need a practical easy-to-use guide to assist them.

“The KnowledgeWeb is an archive of thousands of ideas, insights, collaborations, and events that solve real world problems,” says HMC Director of Knowledge Management Shelley Burns. “It’s not a theoretical or abstract database. This has peer-submitted ideas and recommendations that have stood the ultimate test – that of working in the real world. HMC’s insights, combined with the in-depth knowledge of  on-the-ground hospital managers, is unparalleled.”

“We all know that institutions contain vast amounts of knowledge, though it is largely inaccessible on a broad basis,” says HMC President Thomas Day.  “Collecting and disseminating knowledge – commonly called “knowledge management” – has such huge potential, which, despite the tremendous investment of time and energy by many people and firms, remains largely untapped.”

He says: “Most knowledge is trapped within individuals and for the most part, is thought of as expertise.  A consulting firm has case teams working on similar problems, and they may be able to find some help and direction within their own firm. Healthcare providers do similar work, yet clinical variation is so profound that reducing clinical variation around a best practice is often cited as a huge cost and quality improver.”

HMC not only has gathered these solutions into a single web-based repository, but has made it accessible in the most user friendly format available. According to Day: “We’ve built some excellent methods and tools which allow us to ‘issue-ize’ our knowledge. You ask about an issue, and we share the knowledge others have used to solve that problem. Knowledge is ranked, tagged, indexed, and applied to the analytic tools to tightly integrate them. The definitions of problems allow the direct presentation of the solution knowledge to our clients.”

In addition to being a rich idea archive, the HMC KnowledgeWeb is a real-time collaboration and idea generation platform. Nurses, managers, and staff participate in ongoing web conversations around ideas and topics to add insights on a Best Practice or enter a new idea into the database.  “Interaction is key,” says Burns, “to grow the collective knowledge of the group and build a thriving community around specific topics.”

She says: “If you can’t find what you need or have a challenge to solve, there are two solutions. One is to call HMC and talk to one of our knowledge consultants.  If the solution is in the KnowledgeWeb, we can find it for you quickly. Two, if we need to engage other HMC Partners in developing the solutions, we can do that, too, through surveys, conference calls, and targeted inquiries.”

Expanding world of knowledge

Just what is available on the HMC KnowledgeWeb? You can learn how to streamline discharge processes; or gather staffing ideas to reduce overtime; or develop keys to building a palliative care program, and much more.  Ideas and solutions are available around the clock, every day, to every member of the hospital staff.

More specifically, KnowledgeWeb contains :

Three thousand, one hundred and fifty Best Practices. HMC’s Best Practices Exchange is an online forum designed to spark discussions around real-life issues such as preventing patient falls, managing equipment service contracts, and improving patient satisfaction with environmental services. Our clients can add suggestions or vote “pro” or “con” on a given idea to help create perspective and improve decision-making processes.

Two hundred and sixty-eight Successes & Good Ideas (SGIs). HMC endlessly seeks case studies and interesting articles to stimulate thought and solve problems. Its knowledge managers are frequently adding well-written and informative pieces on every conceivable topic. These SGIs stimulate thought and help you define and solve the healthcare challenges facing you daily.

Two thousand, one hundred and ninety-six Surveys. HMC keeps its pulse on what is happening out where you are, in the actual healthcare field. HMC online surveys have yielded a wealth of data on such topics as off-quality events, nursing staff frustrations, and more. This delivers insight into what is happening in peer facilities and enhances decision making.

Six hundred and seventy-six iConferences. HMC sponsors phone and web-based collaborations called iConferences to allow peers to freely share ideas and solutions to common problems. Administrators from small regional hospitals can receive best practice suggestions from the largest and most successful systems in the country. Contrarily, large hospitals learn the creative ways small hospitals perform tasks such as cross-training staff and streamlining processes.  HMC archives the results of these events for convenient access.

Two hundred and fifty Documents. These documents cover technical and clinical specification sheets, flow and organizational charts, and white papers. They include PowerPoint presentations, PDFs, and  templates that can be downloaded and shared through your organization to enable you to leverage existing best practices.

HMC considers the KnowledgeWeb a work in progress that will improve and change as the clients’ needs vary. “HMC’s KnowledgeWeb has been evolving for over 10 years and will continue to develop into the future,” says Day. “And as excited as I am about where we are today, it’s an exciting and never-ending journey.”