Tool sites offer quick way to bolster performance improvement: knowledge sharing moves beyond organization to entire profession - intranet networking

If a single organization can benefit from sharing knowledge through an internal site (intranet), just imagine the possibilities when virtually the entire body of performance-improvement (PI) knowledge can be made available to any quality professional who wants it.

We're certainly not there yet, but a growing number of professionals are paving the way for such a future with the development of PI tools and other knowledge-sharing sites, many of which are available to the public free of charge. Their sponsors include health care institutions, systems, and public and private agencies.

"From an executive standpoint, I've been just blown away by the fact that there has been money lying on the ground, and no one wants to pick it up; no one knows about it," says Duke Rohe, performance improvement specialist at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. "On a personal note, I hate waste. It turns me off when an organization is wasting resources; we should always be honing ourselves to a better state. There is a wide range of tools available--from the really simplistic to the complex," he says.

"What we're trying to do is to be mentors as well as consultants," adds Bob Skaggs, MEd, academic consultant for the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. "Whenever we have a project with a department, we try to impart to them tools and methods they can use so they won't have to continually rely on us," he explain