What is IKE?
The challenges of poor healthcare outcomes have persisted despite decades of medical and technological progress. One of the most significant barriers is the lack of consistent, high-quality, and interoperable data. Across the healthcare system, valuable knowledge is often siloed, locked in proprietary tools, and represented in ways that can’t easily be shared or reused.
The idea for IKE emerged from years of collaborative work across public health, clinical, and research communities, where the same problem appeared again and again: too much time and money spent rebuilding knowledge from scratch instead of building on existing work. By applying modern software and data engineering principles to healthcare knowledge management, IKE turns fragmented information into reusable, standards-aligned assets that are easy to share, adapt, and apply in new contexts.
The result is a living, collaborative knowledge base that helps everyone work from the same, trusted foundation, whether it is a public health agency responding to an outbreak, a clinician making a treatment decision, or an AI model generating patient education materials.
How IKE Fits Into
The Bigger Picture
IKE is like the structural framework of a skyscraper: strong, reusable, and built to scale. Imagine building knowledge about diabetes care. The foundation comes from trusted standards like SNOMED®, LOINC®, and RxNorm; the middle layers capture reusable assets like test codes, medication mappings, and device data; and the top floors bring it all together to power AI models, clinical decision support, and public health dashboards. Each layer builds on the last, so no one has to start from scratch. The whole ecosystem benefits from a shared, stable architecture and IKE is what makes this architecture possible by ensuring every layer connects seamlessly and can be reused for the challenges ahead.
Join the conversation…
Zulip is an open-source platform built for efficient communication and community building, especially in technical projects and environments. Its threaded conversations let users organize discussions by topic, making it easy to find information and engage in discussions.
Zulip promotes transparency and inclusivity, allowing IKE community members to contribute solutions and create threads to fit their evolving needs. Users can ask Komet, IKE, or general questions in dedicated streams, reach out to project maintainers or contributors for Komet support, and collaborate with other end-users. Zulip will serve as the communication hub for our open source project, supporting knowledge sharing, problem solving, and ongoing engagement.
