Over the last two decades there has been increasing concern about the 'knowledge gap' - the mismatch between what is known in research circles and what is done by practising clinicians. Health policy makers often cannot find, interpret and use the health knowledge they need so turn to consensus opinion. Thus, the clear linkage between ischaemic heart disease, exercise and diet still fail to influence public policy. Such technologies also raise difficult issues such as quality assurance of remote knowledge sources, intellectual property rights, legal liability, and matching the quantity and presentation of knowledge to the needs of the clinicians, policy makers and others who will use them. In the commercial sector, improve knowledge management is viewed as a major step towards organisational change and improved cost-effectiveness.
Large corporations invest considerable resources at all stages in the knowledge chain.
However, most NHS resources are concentrated on the first two stages and the potential for feeding back insights from later stages is scarcely developed. Thus we see an exciting opportunity for transferring insights from commercial knowledge management practice into the UK health sector. In 1997 an Office of Science and Technology Foresight team lead by Jeremy Wyatt concluded that there is an urgent need for a UK centre to advance health knowledge management policy and practice. They pointed out that UK medical research, publishing and education enjoy world-wide respect, putting the UK in an excellent position to lead in the dissemination and implementation of health knowledge and offering the opportunity for considerable export earnings. The role of the Knowledge Management Centre is to identify new and better ways to apply communication and information technologies to health knowledge management activities, at all stages of the knowledge chain, but it will focus on stages iii to v.