Healthcare Knowledge Management: Incorporating the Tools, Technologies, Strategies, and Process of Knowledge Management to Effect Superior Healthcare Delivery

Abstract

AbstractAs medical science advances and the applications of information and communications technologies to healthcare operations diffuse, more and more data and information begin to permeate healthcare databases and repositories. However, given the voluminous nature of these disparate data assets, it is no longer possible for healthcare providers to process these data without the aid of sophisticated tools and technologies. The goal of knowledge management is to provide the decision maker with appropriate tools, technologies, strategies, and processes to turn data and information into valuable knowledge assets. This chapter discusses the benefits to the healthcare arena of incorporating these tools and techniques in order to make healthcare delivery more effective and efficient, and thereby maximize the full potential of all healthcare knowledge assets. To ensure a successful knowledge management initiative in a healthcare setting, the chapter proffers the knowledge management infrastructure framework and intelligence continuum model.The benefits of these techniques lie not only in the ability to make explicit the elements of these knowledge assets, and in so doing enable their full potential to be realized, but also to provide a systematic and robust approach to structuring the conceptualization of knowledge assets across a range of healthcare environments, as the case study data presented demonstrate.KeywordsKnowledge ManagementTacit KnowledgeOrganizational MemorySpine UnitKnowledge AssetThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.