Healthcare Knowledge Management: Integrating Knowledge with Evidence-based Practice

Abstract

Healthcare is experiencing a significant growth in the scientific understanding and practical approach of diseases, care pathways, treatments and clinical decisions. However, the literature reveals that this exponential growth of knowledge is not consistent with the users’ ability to effectively disseminate, transfer and apply healthcare knowledge in clinical practice. Healthcare is intensive in knowledge and its efficient use can profoundly impact the quality of patient care decisions and health outcomes. Over the past decade Knowledge Management (KM), as a concept and a set of practices, has penetrated increasingly into the fabric of managerial processes in organizations all over the world. KM refers to strategies and processes for identifying, capturing, structuring, sharing, storing and applying an organization’s knowledge to extract sustainable competitive advantages. KM in healthcare may be seen as a set of methodologies and techniques to facilitate the creation, acquisition, development, dissemination and utilization of healthcare knowledge assets. The goal of Healthcare Knowledge Management (HKM) is to structure, provide and promote timely and effectively healthcare knowledge to healthcare professionals, patients, individuals and policy makers when and where they need it in order to help them to take high quality, and cost-effective care decisions. The Evidence-Based Practice (EBP) approach focuses on the need for clinicians to keep up to date and improve not only their own skills in seeking the evidence, but also to build on their own knowledge base of what effective practice is. KM can only improve healthcare when knowledge has been successfully integrated with EBP. KM in the context of evidence-based healthcare creates a learning environment and ensures that best practice is captured and disseminated. This work aims to explore how KM practices can leverage different types of healthcare knowledge in the context of EBP. This research is theoretical in nature and seeks to contribute to understand the numerous challenges that exist to fully realize the HKM portfolio, namely knowledge processes that can improve the quality of patient care.