Literature review

Discuss about the Knowledge Management in Healthcare Sector.

In companies or organizations that are mostly based on providing service to other people, knowledge is considered to be an intangible and central asset. The management of knowledge in an industry generally Knowledge being used, reused, created and disseminated. Thus, the Knowledge management has come into the light to manage the knowledge that had transferred within the entire organization (Sharma, Wickramasinghe & Gupta, 2015). The following report about the Knowledge Management in the healthcare sector would be followed by a literature review about similar literature evidences on this matter. In the later part of the report, the healthcare management industry and knowledge transfer through it would be explained. The next part would elaborate in detail about the knowledge management problems and the recommendations that the organizations in the particular sector can use to avoid these problems. Therefore, with this report, it would be easier to analyze the situation of Knowledge Management in healthcare sector, the problems of it and how the problems can come close to a feasible solution.

This section would provide the justification for the papers selected for the required literature review about Knowledge Management process in the Healthcare sector. The literature selected in this regard can be justified as appropriate and justified since all of them focus towards the major point of the management of knowledge in healthcare sector, the problems behind it and the possible solutions that can help to overcome the problems regarding the issue. The papers are informative and true to the matters of topic they focus on. The journal articles selected for the purpose fulfills the matter of presenting the issue that was being looked out for.

According to the findings through the information that the journal articles present, there have been a lot of different views about Knowledge Management in healthcare sector. One of the articles focus on the overview of knowledge management and the methods and techniques that have been used to attain a sustainable knowledge management. The other papers focus on the effect of organizational culture on the way a knowledge transfer is handled (Wickramasinghe, & Haddad, 2018). However, this paper is mostly focused on the situation in the country of Dubai. The other papers in this discussion focuses on the improvement of the customer service and the relationship of the customer and the organization with the help of CRM implementation.

Healthcare management industry and knowledge transfer

The papers selected for this literature review have been justified as choices and have been rationally informative with the respective topics they have presented. The papers have been successful in providing a wholesome idea about Knowledge Management and its implementations in the Healthcare Sectors. The idea of the storing, using, reusing, transferring and managing the knowledge in the industry and the importance of doing so is also described well in the papers (Massaro, Dumay & Garlatti, 2015). The papers also describe how organizations and their operational structures influence the management of knowledge in the healthcare industry and how they can be improved in order to aid the customer service relationship between an organization and its customers.

The papers selected in favor of the following topic do provide with justification about their selections, however, there have also been incidences where the papers have fallen short to provide with a transparent idea about the situations. As for instance, the papers depicting the overview about Knowledge Management in healthcare sectors do not provide with the measures to solve the problems that arises in the healthcare sectors and their knowledge management strategies (Leonard, Bandy & Balik, 2016). The papers that provide information about the influences of an organization in the management of knowledge. However, this paper fails to implicate the detailed view of the organizations spanning the entire world and only focuses on the matters of the organizations in Dubai (Rahman et al., 2018). The next paper helps in providing the solution to the problems that arises in an organization due to issues in knowledge management, however, it only provides with one solution of implementing an ICT procedure. Other than these shortcomings, the papers selected served the purpose of being justified for the literature review.

The Healthcare Industry serves the purpose of maintaining the physical and mental health of the general mass. This industry however, is not only limited to the myriad operations of serving for the people in medical terms but as an industry has opted for the adoption of business strategies as well. Ever since healthcare sectors have emerged as a service provider to the general mass, it had tried to improve its traditional ways of conducting the business and improving the service that they have been providing to the people (El Morr, & Subercaze, 2010). There have been several ups and downs in minding the ways of improvement in this matter. The first important factor that prevails in this industry is to protect and improve its assets. Knowledge serves as one of the most important assets in this industry. Therefore, it is very important to manage the transfer of knowledge throughout the organization to help in improving the relationship of the customer and the organization and improving the customer services as a result.

Knowledge management problems and recommendations

The healthcare industry, from the previous times have been aggressive in serving the human lives and focused on nothing else. It has been the changes in the later times that has made the healthcare industry to acknowledge the evolution in the society, business and technology and has been trying to improve as an industry from both the organizational operational and the aspect of a service provider simultaneously (Gopee & Galloway, 2017). The world of business and technology is ever changing. It cannot be taken for granted that an organization build on traditional terms and operations would be justified to run their operations even after a lot of time has passed on. Since, knowledge is regarded as one of the most important assets of the organizational structure, it is most important that the transfer of knowledge do not result to the destruction of knowledge. Like any other industry, healthcare sectors also have a huge flush of knowledge every day and it increases exponentially (Karamitri, Talias & Bellali, 2017). The most important way to manage the knowledge in the industry is the transfer of knowledge throughout the organization and between all the stakeholders of the industry as well. This includes proper propagation of knowledge through the organization to the respective customer. It is only regarded as a success of an organization if there is no knowledge gap between the organization and its customers. Given the backdrop of healthcare sectors, knowledge is regarded as the most important feature of the organization since the loss of information or the diminished and altered knowledge can result to fatal harm to the customers for this kind of organization.

Knowledge management had always been a central question in human societies. Indeed, its roots are to be found in the early history of human societies and on the other hand, practical knowledge management has always taken place in the society, and transmission of knowledge was much related to the technical progress. There can be a lot of prospects in the management of an organization that may lead to the failure in managing knowledge for the benefit of the organization itself. Since there is no correct evaluation or definition of Knowledge Management, virtually no consensus about the matter exists in reality (Almunawar & Anshari, 2012). The most problematic situation in the scenario is the understanding of the fact about knowledge management. This is because, mostly the workforce in a healthcare system has skilled people in medical backgrounds. Very less number of people exists in this industry who have a sound knowledge in business management as well as in Information and Communication Technology or ICT (Ginter, 2018). Knowledge Management went through a viral phase at the turn of the century and during that time expectations from this system were too much high. So whenever one assesses failure, it is always important to ask if the expectations where realistic to begin with.

Conclusion

The problems regarding the problem of Knowledge Management in healthcare sectors can be categorized as casual and resultant failures (Abidi, 2014). The following are the reasons why Knowledge Management faces problems:

Causal Factors for Knowledge Management Problems:

• Lack of performance indicators and measurable benefits
• Inadequate management support
• Improper planning, design, coordination, and evaluation
• Inadequate skill of knowledge managers and workers
• Problems with organizational culture
• Improper organizational structure

Resultant Factors for Knowledge Management Problems:

• Lack of widespread contribution
• Lack of relevance, quality, and usability
• Overemphasis on formal learning
• Improper implementation of technology
• Improper budgeting and excessive costs
• Lack of responsibility and ownership
• Loss of knowledge from staff defection and retirement

As a recommendation, it can be said that the implementation of a new ICT technique would be valuable in this regard for handling the problems face by the industry in Knowledge Management. This would be done to some extent by the implementation of Electronic Health Recorder or Electronic Medical Recorder, most commonly known as EHR and EMR (Manogaran et al., 2017). This is a device that follows the context of the latest technical advancements and provides the user in collection a patient’s electronically-stored health information in a digital format. The device follows healthcare system standards and it is so made because it would be easier to propagate the information across all other healthcare organizations as well. EHR systems has the capability to store accurate data and capture the state of a patient within no time. It helps in retrieving a patient’s previous paper medical records without the need to find and take out old medical reports (Zipperer, 2016). It also ensures the factor that the data is accurate and legible. EMRs are more effective when extracting medical data for the examination of possible trends and long term changes in a patient due to the digital information being searchable and stored in a single file.

Conclusion

In the end, it can be concluded by saying that there are many problems in managing knowledge throughout an organization in the healthcare industry, but with proper ICT implementation, this can also be achieved. While going through different journal articles in order to find the relevant author works it has been come across that knowledge is regarded as one of the most important and most critical assets of an organization. In healthcare industry, Knowledge Management is considered the most critical to work with as wrong inputs would even lead to life and death situations. Further advancement of the report depicts how the healthcare industry influences the use of knowledge through the organization and its stakeholders and in the end it is described that with the use of the recent ICT device called the Electronic Health Recorder or Electronic Medical Recorder, most commonly known as EHR and EMR, the issues faced for Knowledge Management in healthcare sector could be address and put to a feasible solution.

References

Abidi, S. S. R. (2014). Knowledge management in healthcare: towards ‘knowledge-driven’decision-support services. International Journal of Medical Informatics, 63(1-2), 5-18.

Abidi, S. S. R. (2018). Healthcare knowledge management: The art of the possible. In Knowledge management for health care procedures (pp. 1-20). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

Almunawar, M. N., & Anshari, M. (2012). Improving customer service in healthcare with CRM 2.0. arXiv preprint arXiv:1204.3685.

El Morr, C., & Subercaze, J. (2010). Knowledge management in healthcare. In Handbook of research on developments in e-health and telemedicine: Technological and social perspectives (pp. 490-510). IGI Global.

Ginter, P. M. (2018). The strategic management of health care organizations. John Wiley & Sons.

Gopee, N., & Galloway, J. (2017). Leadership and management in healthcare. Sage.

Karamitri, I., Talias, M. A., & Bellali, T. (2017). Knowledge management practices in healthcare settings: a systematic review. The International journal of health planning and management, 32(1), 4-18.

Leonard, M., Bandy, M. M., & Balik, B. (2016). Healthcare Culture and Knowledge. In Knowledge Management in Healthcare (pp. 45-64). Routledge.

Manogaran, G., Thota, C., Lopez, D., Vijayakumar, V., Abbas, K. M., & Sundarsekar, R. (2017). Big data knowledge system in healthcare. In Internet of things and big data technologies for next generation healthcare (pp. 133-157). Springer, Cham.

Massaro, M., Dumay, J., & Garlatti, A. (2015). Public sector knowledge management: a structured literature review. Journal of Knowledge Management, 19(3), 530-558.

Rahman, M. H., Moonesar, I. A., Hossain, M. M., & Islam, M. Z. (2018). Influence of organizational culture on knowledge transfer: E vidence from the G overnment of D ubai. Journal of Public Affairs, 18(1), e1696.

Sharma, S. K., Wickramasinghe, N., & Gupta, J. N. (2015). Knowledge management in healthcare. TeAM YYePG, 1.

Wickramasinghe, N., & Haddad, P. (2018). Knowledge Management to Address Real Healthcare Needs: The Case of Allergy Care in Australia. In Theories to Inform Superior Health Informatics Research and Practice (pp. 311-322). Springer, Cham.

Zipperer, L. (2016). What Healthcare Knowledge Workers Can Teach Us About Knowledge Sharing. In Knowledge Management in Healthcare (pp. 99-108). Routledge.