Clinical knowledge governance: the international perspective.

As a basis for semantic interoperability, ideally, a Clinical Knowledge Resource for a clinical concept should be defined formally and defined once in a way that all clinical professions and all countries can agree on. Clinical Knowledge Governance is required to create high-quality, reusable Clinical Knowledge Resources and achieve this aim. Traditionally, this is a time-consuming and cumbersome process, relying heavily on face-to-face meetings and being able to get sufficient input from clinicians. However, in a national or even international space, it is required to streamline the processes involved in creating Clinical Knowledge Resources. For this, a Web 2.0 tool that supports online collaboration of clinicians during their creation and publishing of Clinical Knowledge Resources has been developed. This tool is named the Clinical Knowledge Manager (CKM) and supports the development, review and publication of Clinical Knowledge Resources. Also, post-publication activities such as adding terminology bindings, translating the Clinical Knowledge Resource into another language and republishing it are supported. The acceptance of Clinical Knowledge Resources depends on their quality and being able to determine their quality, for example it is important to know that a broad umber of reviewers from various clinical disciplines have been involved in the development of the Clinical Knowledge Resource. We are still far from realizing the vision of a global repository of a great number of reusable, high-quality Clinical Knowledge Resources, which can provide the basis for broad semantic interoperability between systems. However progress towards this aim is being made around the world.