Knowledge Management for Healthcare 333Copyright © 2005, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without writtenReport No. 1: An analysis of the challenges facing UK healthcare-ICT solution
providers
The research project commenced with an analysis of the global healthcare industry,
the findings of which were presented in the form of a preliminary report to Company X’s
senior management. The salient points of the findings were as follows:
(1) There is information overload for healthcare stakeholders — the average physician
spends about 25% of his or her time managing information and has to learn two
million clinical specifics (The Knowledge Management Centre, 2000). This is
further compounded by the fact that biomedical literature is doubling every 19
years. In the UK, each physician receives about 15 kg of clinical guidelines per
annum (Wyatt, 2000). The above indicators illustrate how difficult it is for HIs and
healthcare stakeholders (HSs) to successfully meet the healthcare information
needs that are growing at an exponential rate.
The impact of the above, particularly from a societal perspective, is enormous. Up
to 98,000 patients die every year as a result of preventable medical errors (Duff,
2002). The financial cost of these preventable medical errors cost from US $37.6
billion to $50 billion and, in numerical terms, account for more deaths than from car
accidents, breast cancer, or AIDS (Duff, 2002). A study has pointed out adverse
drug reactions result in more than 770,000 injuries and deaths each year (Taylor,
Manzo, & Sinnett, 2002).
Another study reported in the Harvard Business Review noted that, as early as
1995, there were indications that “more than 5% of patients had adverse reactions
to drugs while under medical care; 43% of those inpatient reactions were serious,
life threatening, or fatal” (Davenport & Glaser, 2002, p. 107).
Advances in biomedical sciences have unalterably transformed the healthcare
sector. Modern-day healthcare stakeholders (physicians, nurses, etc.) require
information about “10,000 known diseases, 3,000 drugs, 1,100 lab tests, 300
radiology procedures ... 2,000 individual risk factors ... with 1,000 new drugs and
biotechnology medicines in development” (Pavia, 2001, pp.12-13). An indicator of
the enormity of the exponential increase in biomedical knowledge is witnessed by
the growth in the National Library of Medicine’s Medline database (4,500 journals
in 30 languages, dating from 1996) of published literature in health-related sciences.
In 2002, Medline contained 11.7 million citations and, on average, about 400,000
new entries were being added per year (Masys, 2002).
Observations evidence the impact of these exponential advances on individual
stakeholders (Masys, 2002). Even if a typical modern-day healthcare stakeholder
were to read two articles a day, it would take him or her 550 years to get updated
with the new literature added every year (ignoring the existing literature level of 11.7
million). If we assume that about 1% of the new literature added every year is of
relevance to a healthcare stakeholder, it would take a stakeholder five years
(reading an average of two articles a day) to be updated with the healthcare
advances of one year. It would appear that contemporary healthcare stakeholders
are always behind the current state of knowledge (Masys, 2002).
(2) In today’s information age, data have become a major asset for healthcare
institutions. Recent innovations in information and communication technologies