- Culled from ICTWorks website
Digital health interventions benefit enormously when implementers document and learn from past and current digital health projects. This is where knowledge management (KM) can help.
Knowledge management is a systematic practice that helps you learn from others and helps others outside your project learn from you. It is an inherently social process, largely dependent on making sure systems and processes are in place and staff are incentivized to do it.
Good knowledge management practices have beneficial outcomes including increased efficiencies, increased information use, and the ability to innovate faster—and better.
Both KM and digital health fields are interdisciplinary. Both involve information, communications, people and technology. And both focus on how information is being collected and used to improve health and development outcomes. To my fellow digital health implementers, KM really wants to be your friend. We’re practically twins separated at birth.
Yet, where digital health implementers often want people to benefit from their technologies as fast as possible, KM practitioners often want to slow things down just enough to make room for the learning required to develop the best intervention possible.