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Use of a Wiki as a Radiology Departmental Knowledge Management System

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Abstract

Information technology teams in health care are tasked with maintaining a variety of information systems with complex support requirements. In radiology, this includes picture archive and communication systems, radiology information systems, speech recognition systems, and other ancillary systems. Hospital information technology (IT) departments are required to provide 24 × 7 support for these mission-critical systems that directly support patient care in emergency and other critical care departments. The practical know-how to keep these systems operational and diagnose problems promptly is difficult to maintain around the clock. Specific details on infrequent failure modes or advanced troubleshooting strategies may reside with only a few senior staff members. Our goal was to reduce diagnosis and recovery times for issues with our mission-critical systems. We created a knowledge base for building and quickly disseminating technical expertise to our entire support staff. We used an open source, wiki-based, collaborative authoring system internally within our IT department to improve our ability to deliver a high level of service to our customers. In this paper, we describe our evaluation of the wiki and the ways in which we used it to organize our support knowledge. We found the wiki to be an effective tool for knowledge management and for improving our ability to provide mission-critical support for health care IT systems.

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Acknowledgement

We would like to thank Dr. Nancy Knight from the University of Maryland for her expert assistance in preparing this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Radiology, University of Maryland School of Medicine, 22 South Greene Street, Rm. N2W78, Baltimore, MD, 21201, USA

    Christopher Meenan & Paul Nagy

  2. University of Maryland Medical Center, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Antoinette King, Christopher Toland & Mark Daly

Authors
  1. Christopher Meenan
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  2. Antoinette King
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  3. Christopher Toland
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  4. Mark Daly
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  5. Paul Nagy
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Correspondence to Christopher Meenan.

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Meenan, C., King, A., Toland, C. et al. Use of a Wiki as a Radiology Departmental Knowledge Management System. J Digit Imaging 23, 142–151 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10278-009-9180-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10278-009-9180-1

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