This piece is the second installment of a five-part series about Public Health Knowledge Management titled, “The Missing Pieces: How Better Knowledge Management Can Complete the Public Health Puzzle.”

We need access to information to do our jobs. This is true of every profession, and especially of public health. The Association of State and Territorial Health Officials state it succinctly:
Public health professionals require accurate data and the ability to access data quickly from disparate sources and transform those data into information and knowledge to do their jobs.
This is especially important to public health because when its professionals “do their jobs,” they are directly impacting the public’s health and well-being – screening for cancers, preventing transmission of HIV, working to reduce air pollution, and responding to humanitarian disasters. The ability to rapidly transform information into public knowledge that can be used to implement health activities is crucial to public health work, which improves health and quality of life for millions of people. While access to information – and more importantly, the right information – is important to every field, it is particularly urgent in public health because human lives are at stake.

In no situation is this more apparent that in emergency operations, where every second counts. Public health professionals are some of the first to respond to disasters, tasked with everything from assessing the dangers from a chemical or biological terror event to providing necessary services in the aftermath of a natural disaster. This was painfully obvious in the humanitarian response to the earthquake in Haiti in 2010. To date, it is the largest global disaster relief operation ever executed, and it is also judged by most to be the worst failure in the history of humanitarian disaster response. According to the Overseas Development Institute, the lack of standardized knowledge management framework was at the crux of the inadequate response:
From a humanitarian response perspective, Haiti demonstrated the critical importance of getting information flows ‘right’. …At the operational level, information was not reinforced by local knowledge because many agencies started with the assumption that there was no data available [emphasis added].
US domestic public health can also look to its own experiences, such as the hard-learned lessons of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, to understand the importance of the being able to access knowledge quickly.

The most efficient way to quickly disseminate knowledge both to the public and among public health professionals is to have universal, effective knowledge management practices. This is invaluable to planning and managing emergency response, as well as addressing “everyday” public health challenges such as containing foodborne illness outbreaks. Knowledge sharing and collaboration also helps professionals to better train and continue learning, producing empowered and qualified workers in the field who are able to continuously improve their performance and have greater impact. Finally, good knowledge management can inform policy by documenting accomplishments and areas where operations can be improved, leading to more effective programs.

Fortunately, good knowledge management has real power to save lives when it is implemented well. Even in remote or resource-poor settings where sophisticated technology can be lacking, programs can implement good knowledge management practices using available resources. USAID’s blog tells the story of a program in rural Malawi that gave community health workers access to critical health knowledge and tools through simple cell phones. Using their phones, these workers were able to conduct HIV testing and counseling (which can reduce new infections once individuals know their status) connect families to family planning resources (which can lower maternal mortality), and, in one case, respond to emergency health situations. Within the US, Project ECHO, which is partially funded by the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and administered by the University of New Mexico, facilitates knowledge sharing between subject matter experts and healthcare providers to coordinate and implement best practices for hepatitis C patients in underserved areas. And UNAIDS has held knowledge management workshops to help HIV prevention programs around the world share their experience and expertise and improve their operations.

The critical need for good knowledge management in public health can be seen both in the potential for losing lives without it, and in the power to save lives and improve health when it is fully harnessed. All areas of public health – from clinical practice to government administration – can improve their ability to respond to health challenges by implementing sound knowledge management practices. In the next installments, we will examine how improved public health knowledge management can help the organizations that implement it – by saving money, improving efficiency, and facilitating legal compliance.

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