Importance of Knowledge Engineering in Healthcare
Health is one of the critical factor that human needs to survive and for carrying out daily activities and daily routines. Human body parts coordinate with one another to carry out different activities. Failure of one of the body parts and organs disrupt the body functions and systems. These are some of the condition that health care deals with to ensure humans are healthy. The matter health depends on the knowledge which is critical in this sector. Lack of the required knowledge in health sectors results in critical challenges the health practitioners face as they try to find a solution to solve health care problems. In this case, I will explore the challenges in knowledge engineering for healthcare.
Knowledge engineering is a field in artificial intelligence that emulates the behavior and judgment of human in a given field of experts. It also involves creating expert systems to assist in solving issues related to a specific line of specialization (Shahid, Rappon, and Berta 2019, p.12). The world today has -more than 7 billion people who require health care services around the globe. These people usually have unique symptoms which require special attention; to handle this massive number, requires enough knowledge for health care services to be successful. In the United States only there are five thousand registered hospitals with over 12 million employees. Each of these employees requires training before they start their new jobs. The employees require to be trained whenever they change jobs or transfer their clinics or hospital. Health care is a knowledge-driven sector which requires continuous training, therefore, knowledge needs to be shared across the departments. This is why knowledge engineering is inevitable in healthcare organizations.
Qualitative research was done in 72 countries by Word health organization in different hospitals. The survey included face to face interview and telephone interview. The research question was to find out the level of patients satisfaction and quality of service delivery.
A one-third of respondent reported to be positively satisfied by health system while the majority were fairly satisfied with the health systems. Different factors were used to measure the level of satisfaction. Aged people were likely to be satisfied than young and educated people while patients with bad and moderate health were badly affected by the health systems. Also, inpatient was satisfied by health systems unlikely the outpatients.
Conclusion
The level of patient’s satisfaction was linked to the quality of health service delivery and doctor engagement and lack of proper health systems (Who.int, 2019).Challenges in knowledge engineering
Challenges Faced in Knowledge Engineering for Healthcare
In the world today, change on lifestyle has greatly affected the human health and as a result, chronic diseases have emerged which has called for new knowledge and given the researchers more task on innovating new measures on how to tackle the menace. A chronic disease like cancer, heart diseases, and diabetes are some of the diseases reducing the life span of people thus increasing death rates and also treating these diseases has become difficult and expensive due to lack of enough health expert in the world. The demand for health practitioners has increased which has become a great challenge for the health organization to meet these demands. The diagnosis of these sicknesses has become also a great challenge for health practitioner, it has become difficult for a doctor to diagnose cancer and diabetes and this has led to the wrong diagnosis and before the disease is discovered it becomes too late to treat. Doctors are usually faced with unique symptoms and before they acquire the required information about the symptoms they struggle to find the information to treat a given disease. Having access to adequate knowledge-based systems in health care can drastically save lives. When the doctor is able to access information anywhere and anytime, this can reduce the assumption and provide better services to the patients (Wasserman2019, p.109).
Due to a few numbers of doctor and high demand makes doctor busy since they have to attend to the entire patient in their list. These make it difficult for doctors to consult from other doctors and are forced to depend on their own personal knowledge. This knowledge may not be credible since the doctor is forced to give a prescription from their assumption of what the sickness is. The prescription may work or may not work. When health care has an organized knowledge system in the hospital it becomes easy for the doctor to search in the system and obtain organized information and they can take further action on how to prescribe treatment. When the hospital has systems of collecting information, it becomes easier for doctors to search the symptoms, prescribe procedure and other vital information that could change the life of the patient for better future.
The hospital continues to lay off the staff and to recruit new staff if the field. These changes of doctors continue to raise malpractice and increase errors in the hospitals. When the doctors are laid off their procedures and practices leave with them leading to increased chances of committing mistakes in the hospital. Fear of making mistakes in the field may shun off professional from taking the risk due to the high lawsuit against them if they commit an error in the hospital (Parker, Andrei, &Broeck 2019, p. 89) Knowledge engineering solutions can solve this solution since the hospital can standardize procedures and provide training on those procedures. Doctors can easily find solution and procedures which can help in preventing or cubing chances of committing mistakes in the hospital.
Solutions to the Challenges of Knowledge Engineering in Healthcare
With innovation, medical records are always updated, transferred electronically and stored. (Ngoc-Thanh, Manuel, and Bogdan, 2017, p.1157). These have its benefits since doctors can easily share information quickly among them and specialist. It also makes it easy to retain a medical record for a patient without losing it. However, these benefits present threats to the patient’s identity, privacy, and confidentiality. Knowledge-based systems enable the doctors to collaborate and share information without violating the patient’s relationship with the doctors. Knowledge management solution allows the doctors to share patient’s symptoms and other important information while keeping the patient anonymous. This makes patient identity and privacy remain protected.
There major advantages of having to adapt to the knowledge-based system in health care. When health care adopt strategies to develop and use knowledge-based systems, this enables health care in providing better services which leads to positive change in the organization (Parker, Andrei, & Van den Broeck 2019, p. 90). Without which the health care become stagnant due to the lack of new knowledge to handle new challenges. Knowledge management in health care plays a key as a foundation of growth. With the right knowledge, it becomes easier for health institution to expand and put systems in place. With the right strategies, it becomes easier to use a combination of different methods, policies, and principles to foster growth in the organization. Technology has come to play a key role which ensures that there is full integration of knowledge-based systems and this has bridged the gap in the way information can be accessed.
Knowledge-based systems have an increase in response time. With the knowledge systems engineering has greatly improved on how doctors’ respond to issues related to health. This has increased the rate by which decisions are made. This is as a result of the availability and easy access to knowledge when they need it. Heath organization being a multidisciplinary institution considers how everyone uses the knowledge in the knowledge system. This ensures that the stakeholders understand how to interact, manipulate with the knowledge for the benefit of everyone.
Knowledge-based systems enhance the quality of service delivery in the health sector. The availability of knowledge that easily available makes it easier for a health practitioner to collaborate with their colleagues which improves consultations and provide guideline when providing health care services organization (Parker, Andrei, & Van den Broeck 2019, p. 90). This has greatly reduced death rates especially to patients with chronic and diseases. Use of knowledge-based systems has made it easier for the doctor to detect symptoms for chronic diseases and apply appropriate measures to prevent deaths by the patients. Health practitioners who are not enough can highly rely on the knowledge-based systems to provide care to the patients especially in remote areas where expert knowledge is required. By use of knowledge engineering systems, the diverse community can use and share expert knowledge which results in better services and streamlining health services around the globe. These enhance service delivery across all borders and make it easier for patients to access health services within their reach. Cutting cost to access quality health services has been the main challenge for chronic disease patients. Lack of health professional and skills has been a challenging factor that has prompted many patients to spend thousands of dollars to seek better services (Passfield, et al. 2017, p1426). With knowledge brought near to the patients and increased learning by health professional has bridged this gap and patients can easily access quality and affordable services Wasserman, J. et al. (2019).
Advantages of Knowledge-Based Systems in Healthcare
Streamlining knowledge management systems in the organization enhances the reuse of new and acquired knowledge in a multidisciplinary organization. This reduces redundancy and inefficiency thus increasing productivity in the organization ases, (M. et al. 2013, p.274). With the knowledge-based systems, it easy to eliminate practices, procedure, and method that does not work in the organization which enhances cost and time-saving. Knowledge-based systems enable the health sectors to eliminate weaknesses and threats that may lead to incompetency and behaviors that may affect the service delivery in the organization (Cárdenas2014, p. 67).
Knowledge engineering in health sector prompts major challenges when health care lacks proper process on how decisions are made by the health practitioners. Being decision support systems knowledge engineering requires experts who have technical skills and technical approach to how decisions are made and how the system ought to work. To have an effective system, it requires the organization to have proper knowledge of what the system should do like given the instruction what results should the system display. The system should describe how it derives to a given solution and also why the systems solved a problem in a particular way. While knowledge engineering focuses on decision support, knowledge management focuses on knowledge accusation this involves people who communicate knowledge, communication process and the knowledge itself. Km concern mostly on the process on how knowledge is created, acquired, validated, presented, distributed and the knowledge application. These are major steps that knowledge management focuses on.
Conclusion
Health sectors are the most critical areas where knowledge-based systems are highly required due to the intensity services required. Lack of knowledge management systems has greatly affected the health sectors and rendered redundancy and collapse of quality services in many regions around the world. Technology has greatly improved service delivery due to the introduction of knowledge engineering systems that enhanced service delivery due to the easy collaboration of health professionals which led to quick decision making. Access to proper and quality services was a major challenge from the patients with chronic diseases, but with the knowledge management systems bridged the gap by enhancing services and brought services closer to the community thus saving high cost and time by the patients. Knowledge engineering has enhanced decision making due to easy availability and accessibility of health information to the doctors and in multidisciplinary organizations. This has ensured that knowledge can be manipulated effectively for the benefit of the organization. Knowledge engineering has enhanced standardized services in health care thus ensuring that health professional does not risk their services in the fear of heavy penalties and lawsuits due to mistakes and errors that occur in their practices. Major benefits of knowledge engineering may include better services, collaboration, and growth among other benefits. Knowledge engineering focuses much on supporting decisions while knowledge engineering focuses on how knowledge is created, acquired, validated, presented, distributed and how the knowledge is applied. The world need to enhance and make policies that ensures knowledge based systems is utilized in major health centers to make service rendering more effective and efficient.
List of References
Cárdenas, I. C. (2014) ‘Using Prior Risk-Related Knowledge to Support Risk Management Decisions: Lessons Learnt from a Tunneling Project’, Risk Analysis: An International Journal, 34(10), pp. 1923–1943. Available at: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=s3h&AN=99516300&site=ehost-live (Accessed: 28 March 2019).
Parker, S. K., Andrei, D. M., & Van den Broeck, A. (2019). Poor work design begets poor work design: Capacity and willingness antecedents of individual work design behavior. Journal of Applied Psychology.https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000383
Shahid, N., Rappon, T. and Berta, W. (2019) ‘Applications of artificial neural networks in health care organizational decision-making: A scoping review’, PLoS ONE, 14(2), pp. 1–22. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0212356.
Wasserman, J. (2019) ‘Advancing Health Services Research to Eliminate Health Care Disparities’, American Journal of Public Health, 109, pp. S64–S69. doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2018.304922.
Wasserman, J. et al. (2019) ‘Advancing Health Services Research to Eliminate Health Care Disparities’, American Journal of Public Health, 109, pp. S64–S69. Available at: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=s3h&AN=134666907&site=ehost-live (Accessed: 1 April 2019).
Who.int. (2019). WHO | How does satisfaction with the health-care system relate to patient experience?. [online] Available at: https://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/87/4/07-050401/en/ [Accessed 1 Apr. 2019].
Passfield, L. et al. (2017) ‘Knowledge is power: Issues of measuring training and performance in cycling’, Journal of Sports Sciences, 35(14), pp. 1426–1434. Available at: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=s3h&AN=122658194&site=ehost-live (Accessed: 1 April 2019).
Cases, M. et al. (2013) ‘Improving data and knowledge management to better integrate health care and research’, Journal of Internal Medicine, 274(4), pp. 321–328. doi: 10.1111/joim.12105.
Ngoc-Thanh Nguyen, Manuel Núñezb, and Bogdan Trawi?ski. (2017). “Collective Intelligent Information and Database Systems.” Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems 32 (2): 1157–60. doi:10.3233/JIFS-169115.
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