Information Storage - Medical Knowledge. Jacob Reider at Family Medicine Notes has a thought-provoking entry concerning how docs think about retrieving knowledge (whether it be from databases or books on their shelf).
Dave Winer can superimpose a hierarchy of thoughts on how many people organize their homes. So long as we learn good searching strategies . (yes .. hierarchies again .. I hear you coming, Dave!) .. and maintain good search engines . it doesn't matter at all. We physicians have strugges for years to develop nomenclatures that describe medicine. ICPC, SNOMED and ICD-9 are all examples of such attempts. ugh.
Although the above is only an excerpt, I couldn't agree more with that last statement. As someone who has worked for a long time trying to figure out how to help docs find what they want on the Net (not to mention time actually spent working in a job with "Knowledge Management" in its title), I can attest to the messiness of this topic. All of those nomenclatures are just "tagging" systems. They don't accurately reflect how a person thinks about medicine...they are just convenient ways to reflect how a machine "thinks" about medicine. If done correctly, it can help a search engine get better results, or assist in providing some semblance of navigability to a structured set of information, but not much more.
The best solution is transparency. Just as there's no one site that can answer every question a doc may have (although Medscape does a good job! ;-) ), there is no one way to organize information on a web site that reflects how every doc thinks about solving a problem. The best we can do is try to present the information in a way that makes it clear how the site builder is organizing the topics and make it incredibly easy for users to navigate that organization. As I said...sticky problem. Feel free to solve it for me and let me know what you come up with.
8:46:19 AM 
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