KnowledgeLink update: just-in-time context-sensitive information retrieval

Medical knowledge expands at a pace that makes it impossible for the individual clinician to keep up, especially for medications. Medication-related queries are the most common type of query that typically go unanswered during the course of providing care.1 Unanswered questions may result in errors, as found in one study evaluating systems failures associated with adverse drug events. This study found that better information might have prevented half of serious medication errors, and that lack of drug-specific knowledge accounted for the single largest proportion of these events (29%).2 While this information was available somewhere (either on paper or electronically), it was not at the providers' fingertips. Information technology should anticipate clinicians' needs, and bring the information they require to the point of care. For this purpose, we developed an application extender called KnowledgeLink, which provides "just-in-time" context-sensitive information retrieval for drug-related queries.