Collective Intelligence in the hospital

June 18, 2008

It’s a Harvard teaching hospital, which means that a procession of young doctors come through, each with a fresh line of inquiry, few of which, when fulfilled, contributes to an institutional memory. Most of the doctors I’ve seen here have been only once or twice.

Doc Searls is sick, but like Jon Udell in the comments, I was drawn to the lines above. In medicine, where information and knowledge is truly built via the collective, and where you might find non-obvious linkages, wouldn’t we really benefit from capturing this collective intelligence, across doctors and patients. A lot of healthcare systems focus on building hospital efficiency and on a per-patient level. I wonder if they do as good a job of capturing this knowledge, and potentially alerting doctors of possible diagnoses or help that add to the knowledge they have built on their own? If not, there is an opportunity there, which someone needs to tap into. And yes, I think ontologies underlying data entry would be a huge plus.

Technorati Tags: Collective Intelligence, Doc Searls, Hospitals