The hospital medical records department is evolving from a paper-based repository to a digital knowledge base giving rise to more compliance and data-mining requirements. Specifically, the accountable care organization (ACO) model and a growing number of other quality-based payer incentive programs require data mining. Compliance with HIPAA privacy requirements, not to mention legal e-discovery requests, point to the need for more than just a CIO to implement and secure IT infrastructure. All these tasks add up to what other service sectors and industries call knowledge management, headed by the chief knowledge officer (CKO).
