New challenges for clinical informatics: knowledge management tools

It is widely recognized that medicine has reached a crisis point. Doctors can no longer memorize or effectively apply the vast amounts of scientific knowledge that are relevant to their clinical practice. Estimates suggest that human knowledge doubles every 33 years 1, while the expansion of medical knowledge is currently estimated at doubling about every 19 years. In contrast, our intellectual capacity has remained practically static over the last thousand or so years 2. Many have looked to Information Technology (IT) to solve the problem of information overload in medicine. Simply converting existing information resources into an electronic form, however, and distributing or making them accessible to users, is far from adequate and can often exacerbate the problem of information overload. Efficient organization and distribution of knowledge is one of medicine’s biggest challenges, and there is much talk about the new paradigm of ‘knowledge management tools’ which will transform the way medicine is practised.