Analyzing Knowledge Management in Healthcare: A Review of Literature

This literature review explores knowledge management within the healthcare sector, emphasizing its critical role in enhancing service quality and patient care. It delves into the challenges associated with knowledge transfer, including organizational culture, inadequate management support, and the effective utilization of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). The review highlights the importance of managing knowledge as a central asset, particularly in an industry where accurate and timely information is paramount. The study also suggests the implementation of Electronic Health Records (EHR) and Electronic Medical Records (EMR) as a valuable ICT technique to address these challenges by improving data accuracy, accessibility, and knowledge dissemination among stakeholders, ultimately leading to better healthcare outcomes. Desklib offers a platform to explore similar solved assignments and past papers.

Running head: KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT IN HEALTHCARE SECTOR
Knowledge Management in Healthcare Sector
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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Table of Contents
Introduction.................................................................................................................................................2
Literature review.....................................................................................................................................2
Justification of paper selection.............................................................................................................2
Summary of findings...........................................................................................................................2
Strengths of the papers.........................................................................................................................3
Gap in the literature.............................................................................................................................3
About the industry...................................................................................................................................4
The knowledge management problem.....................................................................................................5
Recommendation.........................................................................................................................................6
Conclusion...................................................................................................................................................7
Reference.....................................................................................................................................................8

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Introduction
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.
Literature review
Justification of paper selection
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.

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Summary of findings
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.
Strengths of the papers
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.
Gap in the literature
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.

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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.
About the industry
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.
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

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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.
The knowledge management problem
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.
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:

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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
Recommendation
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

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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.

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Reference
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.

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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.