The Center for Knowledge Management (CKM) captures, organizes, and preserves the knowledge that supports Vanderbilt Health’s clinical care, operational workflows and institutional decision-making.  By documenting enterprise-wide initiatives and their relationships, CKM helps ensure institutional knowledge remains accessible and reusable over time.

Notably, CKM has partnered with collaborators across the medical center to preserve and better understand the medical center’s clinical decision support (CDS) knowledge. The team developed the Clinical Support Knowledge Acquisition and Archival Tool (CS-KAAT) which converts CDS content into a structured, human-readable format that can be analyzed, updated, and reused independent of the software system in which it resides.

Originally developed during Vanderbilt Health’s transition to eStar, CS-KAAT enabled CKM and HealthIT to extract and preserve CDS knowledge from legacy systems for migration and future reuse. The structured metadata within CS-KAAT reveals relationships among CDS rules, workflows, data elements, and supporting evidence. Converting CDS content into a structured, human-readable format makes it easier to identify relationships among related content and reuse knowledge outside of the original CDS system.

CS-KAAT was expanded to capture and preserve another type of CDS: inpatient and outpatient order sets. Like other content housed in the system, order sets are explicitly linked to supporting evidence identified by CKM expert information scientists. 

Bringing CDS content together enables broader analysis of clinical practices, workflows, and patient care across the enterprise and creates a foundation for maintaining and updating CDS content over time.

The evidence framework underlying CS-KAAT is also sufficiently flexible to support the archiving and development of additional knowledge resources, such as CKM’s databases of evidence summary answers to clinical and genetic questions and the Vanderbilt Health Lab Tests Expert Guide & Data Repository. Aggregating these knowledge sources into one system further enables cross-project information discovery and linkages.