A Personalized Public Health Content Management Tool: Knowledge Management + Customization + Open-Source

A systematic approach to the development of effective information and decision support systems has been found to be critical for their successful design and implementation. Knowledge management (KM) provides a set of principles, tools and a systematic approach to optimize and integrate the processes of creating, sharing, and using knowledge. With CDC funding through the University of Washington’s Center of Excellence in Public Health Informatics, the myPublicHealth project has implemented a content management system (CMS) built using KM best practices and open-source systems and informed by public health (PH) practitioner's information needs, work processes, and environment. The myPH CMS was built in collaboration with PH practitioners, librarians, academics, researchers, and software engineers with particular attention to the creation, capture, sharing, and leveraging of information that is systematically gathered, managed, used, analyzed, and made available for sharing and discovery in a PH organization.

In the project’s first phase, input from an information needs assessment and workflow analysis informed the system requirements, interface design, toolkits providing selected subject-based content, and rapid access to PH resources by integrative web services that support and enhance retrieval of critical information needed for decision-making by PH professionals. The project’s second phase focuses on providing:  1) user-customizability features that enable PH practitioners to customize the interface and tailor the content of a centrally hosted myPH, and 2) the myPH system as open-source with a GNU GPL license for code distribution. The overall aim of this phase is to allow the highest level of personalization of myPH for both the individual practitioner and local PH department use cases. In this presentation we discuss the challenges and lessons learned while implementing this “next generation” of myPH, share the procedures undertaken to open source the software, and describe our experiences applying KM best practices in “real-life” PH scenarios.