Developing collaborative virtual learning community for the Korean community health practitioners

Abstract

Community Health Post workers are mainly registered nurses. They provide first-level primary health care to the numerous underserved rural communities in Korea. The primary goal of our project is to provide technological foundation for the community health practitioners to form a virtual community that collaboratively solves problems and learns to improve their patient caring and treatment skills. The main enabling technology is a collaboratively maintained knowledge management system, which assists the community health practitioners to make appropriate diagnoses and also to determine the corresponding expected outcomes and interventions to perform given the patient's symptoms. The knowledge management system includes a knowledge base, which is converted from the standardized nursing process guidelines. In addition, the knowledge management system is also used as a case retrieval system so that the community health practitioners can compare the current case in progress with the similar prior cases. We have developed a prototype system and finished a preliminary evaluation of the system.