The Center for Knowledge Management was created to support knowledge sharing and reuse across Vanderbilt University Medical Center. To transform existing tacit knowledge residing within medical center personnel and systems, and enhance it with subjective insight from domain experts, we create new information products that preserve institutional knowledge with value added benefits.

CKM information scientists extract, capture and organize data elements from across the clinical and research enterprises with the ultimate goal of providing full understanding of all actionable, reusable data that is produced and consumed at VUMC.

Extract – gather from many, often-siloed, sources

Capture – provide clear history, provenance and metadata

Organize – present in intuitive ways for new uses

To facilitate access to the new information products, CKM programmers develop customized databases with web-based points of access. These linked repositories allow CKM to identify and visualize connections between previously disconnected data sources and append domain knowledge, such as targeted evidence syntheses, for further contextualization of grouped elements. Applying expertise in information organization, information lifecycle, and data science, CKM is creating a central meta-vocabulary through which concepts from all systems are brought together and captured in clear, human-readable language, thus improving understanding of the lineage and meaning of specific data elements as they are invoked in multiple clinical systems and processes and priming them for reuse and re-creation.