Piloting a Customizable Knowledge Management System to Support Public Health Practice

Public health (PH) practice relies on fragmented information systems that do not provide the decision support capability or access to evidence-based resources. These resources are needed so PH can respond to the many population health challenges of today--such as communicable disease epidemics, environmental disasters, bioterrorist events, and chronic disease control, among others. myPublicHealth is a knowledge management system populated with a collection of resources driven by PH practitioner information needs and presented and accessed through a customizable interface.
Methods: We employed a collaborative user-designer approach to build an interactive, customizable information system to support the collection, description, management, and retrieval of PH documents, data sets, learning objects, software, and tools. Resources are organized for search and presentation using current metadata standards, and are accessible through a web-based interface, namely myPublicHealth. Pilot testing and evaluation has three goals:  (1) research whether and how PH practitioners will adapt and customize myPublicHealth for their own knowledge management purposes; (2) determine what content is most needed by users that will in turn inform continuing design of the customizability features; and (3) understand how myPublicHealth can seamlessly be incorporated into the users' work environment.
Results: The system is being piloted in Washington and Montana for use at all levels of service--local, statewide, rural, tribal, and urban--for agencies to manage the collection, description, management, and retrieval of evidence-based information needed for PH decision making.
Conclusions: Efforts are underway to test whether this approach will reduce time spent searching across and through materials, enhance decision making and ultimately improve the overall quality of PH services.