Tailored Knowledge Management Strategy Promoting Patient Care Quality

The trend towards multidisciplinary collaborations is noticeable within the healthcare sector and is essential to manage the growing demand of advanced specialist care partly due to the aging population. In a successful multidisciplinary collaboration the combined knowledge is used to its fullest potential, which can be achieved through successful Knowledge Management (KM).KM is described as the practice of making the most effective use of the intellectual capital through gathering appropriate people to assure sharing, reasoning, and collaboration. The concept was introduced in the business sector in the 90’s and the healthcare sector is known as a late adopter of these practices. Solutions based on Information and Communication Technologies have been thoroughly discussed in previous research and this study excludes this aspect, in favor of the people issue. There are opinions that being a late adopter has advantages due to the opportunity of learning from others’ mistakes, however the research indicate that each KM initiative needs to be tailored to the specific conditions of the organization to achieve desired effects and there are costly KM failures documented. Previous studies show that a high rate of the mistakes within care processes could have been prevented with increased knowledge and Healthcare Knowledge Management (HKM) is shown as a method to achieve increased patient safety and care quality.The objective of this study is to investigate how to design a KM strategy that suits the sectorspecific characteristics: knowledge intensive organization, complex organization structure, timeconstrained processes, researched-based practice, and publicly owned. The conceptual contribution of the study is the prerequisites for KM in healthcare, guiding the development of a tailored KM strategy, with the potential for increased patient care quality. The prerequisites were based on previous literature within KM and HKM and further developed from the findings of a benchmark study, consisting of seven initiatives in different life-cycle phases, but with the same sector-specific characteristics. The current conditions in the case study organization were identified through direct observations, 17 in-depth interviews with managers, and a workshop including 32 physicians. The current conditions were analyzed in accordance to the prerequisites and managerial implications were formulated.