Healthcare KM, The Knowledge in KM, KM by Industry

08-Dec-06 Archive of Weekly KM Blog by Stan Garfield

KM Books

Healthcare Knowledge Management: Issues, Advances and Successes by Rajeev Bali and Ashish Dwivedi (Editors)

Healthcare practitioners and managers increasingly find themselves in clinical situations where they have to think fast and process myriad diagnostic test results, medications and past treatment responses in order to make decisions. Effective problem solving in the clinical environment or classroom simulated lab depends on a healthcare professional’s immediate access to fresh information. Unable to consult a library for information, the healthcare practitioner must learn to effectively manage knowledge while thinking on their toes.

Knowledge Management (KM) holds the key to this dilemma in the healthcare environment. KM places value on the tacit knowledge that individuals hold within an institution and often makes use of IT to free up the collective wisdom of individuals within an organization. Healthcare Knowledge Management: Issues, Advances and Successes will explore the nature of KM within contemporary healthcare institutions and associated organizations. It will provide readers with an understanding of approaches to the critical nature and use of knowledge by investigating healthcare-based KM systems. Designed to demystify the KM process and demonstrate its applicability in healthcare, this text offers contemporary and clinically-relevant lessons for future organizational implementations.

The editors of this book have assembled a group of international contributors that reflects the diversity of KM applications in the healthcare sector. While many KM texts suffer from pitching theoretical issues at too technical a level, Healthcare Knowledge Management approaches the topic from the more versatile “twin” perspectives of both academia and commerce. This unique text is integrative in nature — a practical guide to managing and developing KM that is underpinned by theory and research.

Table of Contents

KM Links

The Knowledge in Knowledge Management by Fred Nickols

This article clarifies some terms commonly used in discussions about knowledge management, including explicit, tacit, implicit, declarative, procedural, and strategic knowledge. It also covers Integration, Practical Matters, Making Implicit Knowledge Explicit, Developing Procedural Knowledge, and Transferring Tacit Knowledge.

KM Questions

Q: Is KM more valuable for some industries than others, and if so, which ones?

A: Knowledge Management is potentially valuable for all industries, but certain business units and functions within firms have tended to more frequently exploit its potential. For example, almost all consulting and systems integration firms have long recognized the value of KM since knowledge is their primary offering.

Functions such as product development, manufacturing, research & development, and training are typical KM users within companies. Industries such as Oil and Gas, Pharmaceutical, and Discrete Manufacturing usually have at least one KM initiative.