Building a Customizable Knowledge Management Environment to Support Public Health Practice: Design Strategies

Public health practice is characterized by a lack of evidence- based decision support systems to help solve problems for the myriad of population health challenges today-- from epidemics to chronic disease to bioterrorism and environmental disasters. We report on the design strategies utilized in developing a customizable public health knowledge management system, including the results of a literature review of research on information needs of public health practitioners, inventory of resources and roles, preliminary workflow analysis, and rapid prototyping. We employed a collaborative user-designer approach and multi-phased prototyping methodology aimed at achieving our goal of an interactive, customizable digital system to support the collection, description, management, and retrieval of public health documents, data sets, learning objects, software, and tools.