Modeling the Pathways of Knowledge Management Towards Social and Economic Outcomes of Health Organizations.

Ion Popa,Simona Ștefan

doi:10.3390/ijerph16071114

Abstract

Despite the increasing emphasis placed on knowledge management (KM) by the business sector and the common belief that creating, acquiring, sharing, and the use of knowledge enable individuals, teams, and communities to achieve superior performance, within the healthcare context, there is still room from improvements from both the theoretical and empirical perspectives. The purpose of this paper is to outline the contribution of KM process to the social- and economic-related outcomes in the context of health organizations. Given the theoretical approach on the considered concepts and their relationships, a conceptual model and seven research hypotheses were proposed. The empirical data were provided by a cross-sectional investigation including 459 medical and nonmedical employees of Romanian heath organizations, selected by a mixed method sampling procedure. A partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) approach was selected to provide information on the relevance and significance of the first- and second-order constructs, test the hypotheses, and conduct an importance performance matrix analysis. The PLS-SEM estimation showed positive and significant relationships between KM process and quality of healthcare, and organizational-level social and economic outcomes. Moreover, the research results provided evidences for the complex complementary mediation of the quality of healthcare and social-related outcomes on the relationships between KM process and social and economic outcomes. The theoretical and managerial implications are discussed and suggestions for future research are provided at the end of the paper.

Highlights

Given the rapid expansion of the global knowledge-based economy, organizations are facing a pressing need to identify and operationalize the most appropriate solutions that enable them to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage
The basic processes are those are those of providing medical care, and Knowledge management (KM) practices embedded within those processes are more of providing medical care, and KM practices embedded within those processes are more likely to be likely to be translated into enhanced quality of care, patient satisfaction, health status, and life quality
We considered the nonmedical employees of health organizations as necessary to include within the study sample

Summary

Introduction

Given the rapid expansion of the global knowledge-based economy, organizations are facing a pressing need to identify and operationalize the most appropriate solutions that enable them to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. Within the new knowledge-based economy, bases and banks of information and knowledge are created, managed within organizations, administrations, countries, and groups of countries, being valued as real “treasures” [1]. In the knowledge-based view, knowledge is considered a strategic asset in achieving a long-term competitive advantage. Knowledge-based organizations must “treasure” a certain amount of knowledge, but should deliberately and systematically design the right processes through which new knowledge is acquired and ensure existing knowledge assets effectively contribute to the superior outcomes [2], encourage the best practices, and support continuous organizational learning [3]. Public Health 2019, 16, 1114; doi:10.3390/ijerph16071114 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph

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