Today's health care demands knowledge management strategy

The introduction of information technology (IT) into health care organisations - over the past three decades - has posed significant challenges regularly resulting in reports of persistent underperformance and failure. At the beginning of the 21st century, technological development has made it humanly impossible for unaided healthcare professionals to possess all the knowledge needed to deliver medical care with the efficacy and safety made possible by current scientific knowledge. This paper investigates how healthcare organizations are adopting rigorous methods and technologies for knowledge management (KM) as a potential solution to the probable knowledge crisis. However, awareness and understanding of such methods are not widespread. Critics are claiming that these technologies are not designed to be compatible with others neither are they interoperable. This paper describes an effort by the National Health Service for individuals, organisations and partners (commercial companies supplying services to the NHS) to demonstrate their belief in the importance of improving KM in medicine and show that this can be best achieved through collaboration and consensus. The paper looks at National Knowledge Service which has been set up to provide a range of services to members and partners, through one or more open-access Websites