New Tool for Acquiring Tacit Knowledge in Healthcare

Abstract

Over the last ten years, knowledge management (KM) has penetrated increasingly in organisational and management processes in healthcare as a concept and a set of good practices in order to systematically identify, capture and share knowledge into an organization. However, there is a lack of a practical system that records tacit knowledge and turns it into explicit. Healthcare professionals are arguably the most reliable asset that clinical organizations currently owing to their experience and knowledge of corresponding medical specialities. The main goal of this project is to create a tacit knowledge platform that acquires, stores and transmits medical experience at the clinician’s group at the Hospital Sant Joan de Déu de Manresa. Through specific web and app designs, we describe a new system that guarantees the acquisition of tacit knowledge, through recordings and analysis of medical sessions, and its transformation into explicit knowledge. This interface is presented as an educational tool and to enhance the information exchange of state-of-the-art medical topics, different pathology treatments, diagnostic, and surgical practice of more common interventions. A key feature of the developed interface is the search engine in the developed tools to browse all performed sessions and literature reviews, which was a priority for/nhealthcare professionals. A preliminary evaluation of the developed tools by healthcare professionals provided very promising results, demonstrating the benefit of KM in clinical environments.