ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines how proactive collaboration between patients, the medicinal products, scientific community, and clinicians can lead to better outcomes for all. In terms of knowledge management, the birth of the web has caused a comparably seismic shift in how knowledge arises and travels. New opportunities are opening up, which may seem like an existential threat to the traditional discovery, research and development model for medicines. The change in knowledge access is particularly well illustrated by a visual model created in 2010 by Lucien Engelen at Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands with his colleague Marco Derksen. The pharmaceutical industry considers knowledge management as an internal matter. A learning health care system continuously and reliably captures, curates, and delivers the best available evidence to guide, support, tailor, and improve clinical decision making and care, safety, and quality.
