How is Knowledge Management revolutionizing the Health Care Industry

The healthcare industry is a knowledge-driven industry and depends heavily on the availability of updated training, health services, innovative and clinical knowledge to solve problems and provide the best possible healthcare, innovate, and achieve excellence in the field.

A well-defined Knowledge Management (KM) framework is critical for healthcare organizations to achieve this goal. Knowledge Management is all about connecting people to people and knowledge enabling them to achieve strategic objectives such as innovation, competitive edge, continuous learning, and improvement.

Let’s see below why the KM framework is vital for healthcare organizations.

  1. Empower decision making capabilities: In the digital age, everyone is constantly bombarded with new information. Healthcare professionals need to make informed choices all the time to make critical decisions that might be lifesaving. However, they might feel handicapped if the information is not streamlined and accessible on the go and round the clock. Knowledge management systems can help with the flow and accessibility of information that can enable doctors to research valuable information regarding symptoms and medical issues that can make life for patients better.
  2. Prevent medical errors by protecting knowledge: Like any other field, healthcare is also highly competitive. As employees leave or are laid off, their knowledge of medical procedures of best practices in their specific field of specialization is lost by the employee, which creates a knowledge gap and room for errors which can be disastrous in the healthcare industry. Healthcare knowledge management solutions can standardize all medical purchases, best practices, and provide easy access to the necessary training. This ensures that all required knowledge stays and is accessible on the go to everyone even if a person leaves, thus reducing the risk of mistakes due to lack of necessary knowledge.
  3. Encourage upskilling: The medical field is constantly evolving due to new medical procedures, drug research, and trials. To provide optimal healthcare and medical advice, medical students can not rely on the knowledge they learnt during medical studies. They need to constantly evolve and upskill themselves.  Healthcare organizations by establishing a KM framework can encourage sharing knowledge, best practices, learning, industry research and developments that can be accessed by all to upskill and learn from others.
  4. Collaboration with other experts:  The health care system is one of the most complex systems that we encounter in society (Anderson & McDaniel, 2000; Orr & Sankaran, 2007; Re-inhardt, Hussey, & Anderson, 2004); it requires collaboration with people in different healthcare domains to provide the best healthcare to every individual. With medical records going digital, it is much easier for doctors to share, search and discuss records, which is a concern for many because of the threat to patient/doctor confidentiality. However, a KM system enables you to capture, and share symptoms, medical conditions or any other helpful information while keeping the identity anonymous. This makes it easier to share life-saving knowledge without compromising the patient’s privacy.

There is ample evidence to support how a KM framework can help healthcare organizations and professionals improve the quality of care of patients and save lives. The setting up of a KM framework in healthcare organizations is no longer a choice, it is imperative to make more-informed choices and improve patient care, which is the ultimate goal of the healthcare industry.

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