The objective of TACIT is to unlock some of the tacit knowledge of Europes highly experienced senior clinicians and to combine that knowledge with readily accessible explicit knowledge. This will enhance decision making at all levels of care delivery including the experts themselves by facilitating sharing of expertise within Healthcare Communities of Practice, with the goal to reduce clinical risk and improve the quality of service for the patient throughout the care delivery process.
The emphasis of this approach is on the clinician, providing instruments to allow him/her to take better and more informed decisions. It will be fully prototyped and experimented within the key clinical process of cancer care, addressing the substantial problems of bridging clinical expertise between secondary (hospital) care and after care led by the general practitioner and supporting specialist community nurses.
The challenges to achieving this vision are:
- Defining what knowledge is required TACIT, as its name implies, will focus on the tacit knowledge held by experienced clinicians and will analyse exactly how this gets applied in clinical decision processes within the user partners. In addition, a key feature of TACIT will be a self-learning capability, recognising that clinical decisions are iterative, reducing uncertainty and imprecision through stages of tests, analysis and the generation of further ideas.
- Eliciting tacit knowledge TACIT will prototype ubiquitous knowledge elicitation tools which will monitor, record, film and capture the actions, words and results of the senior clinicians as they work with patients, and store this in a multimedia database.
- Applying the knowledge the aim of TACIT is to try to apply the latest thinking in "expertise" management to tapping into the tacit knowledge base in unstructured and interactive ways.
- Locating expertise when systems for knowledge fail - a major aspect of tacit knowledge management is the identification of who holds the expertise, and the provisioning of communications with that person when required (expert location). TACIT will include a peer-to-peer expertise location and sharing network to enable experts to be quickly identified and communicated with.
- Taking cultural and linguistic differences into account TACIT aims to cross linguistic and cultural boundaries as far as possible in the sharing of clinical experience, ensuring that expertise can be shared across Europes health organisations.
For further information, please visit:
http://www.tacit-ist.org
Project co-ordinator:
Guys and St Thomas' Hospital (UK)
Partners:
- Guys and St Thomas' Hospital, (UK)
- COGENTA Limited, (UK)
- FOURSIGHT Limited, (UK)
- EXPERT SYSTEM S.P.A., (IT)
- METAWARE S.P.A., (IT)
- Libera Universita "Campus Bio-Medico" Di Roma, (IT)
- Center for Usability Research & Engineering, (AT)
- AIRIAL CONSEIL, (FR)
- Corpora Plc, (UK)
Timetable: from 06/04 to 08/06
Total cost: 4.271.940
EC funding: 2.500.000
Instrument: STREP
Project Identifier: IST-2002-507691