Case Studies in Knowledge Management

Knowledge Management for Healthcare 335

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of medical data into relevant clinical information. Future healthcare systems would

have to shift their emphasis to deal with the intangibles of knowledge, institutions,

and culture.

Healthcare institutions require a framework that would help to assess how best to

identify and create knowledge from internal and external organizational experi-

ences and how best to disseminate it on an organization-wide basis in a manner that

ensures that the acquired knowledge is available for preventive and operative

medical diagnosis and treatment when required. This would call for the contextual

recycling of knowledge which has been acquired from the adoption of healthcare

industry trials. KM can assist the healthcare industry to become viable by giving

healthcare information context, so that other healthcare providers can use the

healthcare industry to extract knowledge and not information. The healthcare

industry is focused on the technology aspect of healthcare and that the key to

success of the healthcare sector in the 21st century is an effective integration of

technology with the human-based clinical decision-making process. It is therefore

important for Company X to develop a conceptual healthcare management frame-

work that encompasses technological, organizational, and managerial perspec-

tives for the healthcare industry.

(8) The first report ended by stating that, from a management perspective, these new

challenges have created the need for a CKM (Clinical Knowledge Management)

system that can assist healthcare stakeholders in alleviating the problem of

information explosion in the healthcare industry. The primary obstacle to the

report’s recommended integration of the KM paradigm in healthcare was the lack

of any established framework or model which had its roots in either clinical or

healthcare environments.

KM does not have any commonly accepted or de facto definition. However, KM has
become an important focus area for organizations (Earl & Scott, 1999). It has been argued
that KM evolved from the applications of expert systems and artificial intelligence
(Liebowitz & Beckman, 1998; Sieloff, 1999). Almost all the definitions of KM state that
it is a multidisciplinary paradigm (Gupta, Iyer, & Aronson, 2000) which has further
accentuated the controversy regarding the origins of KM. It has been argued that the
main aim behind any strategy of KM is to ensure that knowledge workers have access
to the right knowledge, to the right place, at the right time (Dove, 1999).
One of the main factors behind widespread interest in KM is its role as a possible
source of competitive advantage (Nonaka, 1991; Havens & Knapp, 1999). A number of
leading management researchers have affirmed that the Hungarian chemist, economist,
and philosopher Michael Polanyi was among the earliest theorists who popularized the
concept of characterizing knowledge as “tacit or explicit” which is now recognized as the
de facto knowledge categorization approach (Gupta et al., 2000; Hansen, Nohria, &
Tierney, 1999; Zack, 1999).
Explicit knowledge typically takes the form of company documents and is easily
available, whilst tacit knowledge is subjective and cognitive. One of the characteristics
of explicit knowledge is that it can be easily documented and is generally located in the
form of written manuals, reports, and/or found in electronic databases (Dwivedi, Bali,
James, & Naguib, 2001a). As such, it is easily accessible and in many cases available on