Article Title: “Knowledge management practices in healthcare services”
Myllarniemi, J., Laihonen, H., Karppinen, H., & Seppanen, K. (November 01, 2012). Knowledge management practices in healthcare services. Measuring Business Excellence, 16, 4, 54-65.
Summarization:
The purpose of the study is to develop understanding about the role of information and knowledge in healthcare processes and thereby create a basis for practices that would better support the actual service provision. This paper seeks to model and analyze the service processes of two case settings: laboratory and radiology units of a Finnish regional healthcare system. Finnish healthcare is facing many challenges that many other healthcare providers are experiencing today. They are trying to decrease costs but continue to improve their performance especially when the large population of patients is elderly. This article reflects on how important it utilizes knowledge resources and has active knowledge sharing among management. The paper also expresses the need for comprehensive KM initiatives instead of just transferring information. The paper services to answer two research questions, “What kind of challenges and problems are related to the existing knowledge practices and processes?” and “how could the existing knowledge processes and practices be developed in order to support service provision better?” I agree with the paper in that they state “Knowledge management aims to improve organizations effectiveness and performance by stressing the importance of knowledge creation, development, organization, and finally, leveraging”. This is a great key point and highlights the true meaning behind knowledge management. Today in healthcare everything revolves around health information systems. It is key to a healthcare practices success and federal government even now mandates doctor’s offices to have some type of health information system, and to record certain patient information or else the doctors will be penalized. I agree with Berg ( 2004), that health information management deals with the challenge of integrating health information systems in healthcare work. Healthcare facilities have been dealing with this challenge in which there is many different ways to approach the task. It is management’s job to come up with a efficient way to collect all the data and maintain a good work flow. According to Moss (1999), knowledge management is a term of understanding, defining and utilizing available knowledge provides the decision makers a useful tool for managing their organizations”. I also agree with the article that at the organizational levels both qualitative and quantitative information is needed to make decisions.
The second part of the paper discusses the empirical part of the paper in which the authors show relationships between those who provide service and those who purchase the service. Both service providers in the paper are from Finland. According to the article “based on the empirical data, several so called use cases were recognized, which refers to a certain situation where a clinician utilizes knowledge provided by the surrounding healthcare system”. The analysis showed that there were quite a few cases that were identified where information and KM had been the result of some change in the way the service process was executed. A weakness that I believe this study had is that they analyzed 32 cases. I think they needed to analyze more cases to get a more accurate result. Another idea would have been to analyze 30 cases and then once again 6 months later and compare the results. There are different decision-making situations in operative healthcare in which were identified in this article. In summary this article shows how important it is to develop knowledge processes and practices in healthcare organizations to be successful and efficient. It shed importance on knowledge bases value creation for healthcare management. I agree that it is important to recognize the importance of a multiple knowledge resources that are used in healthcare processes.