TUSK: Tools to Integrate and Share Health Knowledge

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Knowledge management is becoming an increasing important factor in the education of health professionals as both faculty and students wrestle with the explosive growth of information and growing time constraints. TUSK, the Tufts University Scientific Knowledgebase (formerly HSDB) is a database-driven software system developed over the past 8 years that is used extensively by the medical, dental, veterinary schools at Tufts and has recently been installed at the New York Medical College (NYMC). Built using open source tools and with an architecture based on open standards, TUSK supports local content sharing and personal knowledge management. Although extremely effective in supporting integrated medical curricula, both faculty and students have expressed the need for easier access to a wider range of external content resources, particularly those relevant to the clinical years of training. The overall goal of this project is to enable seamless local and inter-institutional sharing of medical content in a discretionary and secure manner through a common TUSK interface. The first aim of this project is to extend the TUSK system to integrate external as well as internal content interface, forming coherent connects between all sources of content. This will involve the representation of content from diverse sources as searchable "nodes" within TUSK and the implementation of system that associates all content nodes against a common medical vocabulary (the UMLS). The second aim is to implement automated authorization and rights managements to facilitate the cross-institutional use of content. The Internet2/NSF authentication and authorization middleware (Shibboleth) as well as digital rights management standards will be integrated into the TUSK system enabling controlled access to content among schools using TUSK and other Shibboleth-enabled systems. The results of this project will provide immediate and direct benefits to current users of TUSK-based systems by providing access to a wider range of clinically relevant content, facilitating the controlled sharing of curricular material and enhancing the use of the TUSK knowledge management features particularly during the clinical years of training. In addition, the experiences gained in the implementation of standards-based cross-institutional authentication and digital rights management are expected to have broader impact on the development and application of these services to health sciences education.