An analysis of knowledge management mechanisms in healthcare portals

Abstract

Healthcare portals are becoming increasingly popular with Internet users since they play an important role in supporting interaction between individuals and healthcare organizations with a Web presence. Additionally, many of these organizations make use of knowledge management mechanisms on their healthcare portals to manage the abundance of health-related information, and exchange and share information with their users. Hence, the objective of this study is to evaluate the extent to which knowledge management mechanisms can be supported by healthcare portals. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of knowledge management mechanisms used by 60 healthcare portals to access, create and transfer knowledge. We selected healthcare portals from two geographical regions (i.e. North America and Asia) and three healthcare portal provider categories (i.e. hospital, government, non-government). We found that healthcare portals from different geographical regions and portal provider categories differed significantly on how they used their portals to access, create and transfer knowledge. The results of this study can be used by healthcare portal providers to enhance their knowledge management practices and improve their customer service relationships.

How can knowledge exchange portals assist in knowledge management for evidence-informed decision making in public health?

“…Khanna et al [23] were the only authors to specifically use the criteria by Lee et al [11] and Goh et al [13] to conduct a ‘quality assessment’ of a portal in regards to features supporting knowledge management. Their assessment revealed that the maternal child health portal contained many features to support knowledge access, but not knowledge creation (e.g.…”

“…Twelve of the 15 reviewed articles [20-26,28,29,31-33] described the purpose and functionality of portals broadly in relation to the three domains of knowledge management [11,13] and are discussed here.…”

“…Where the articles described portal design features or functions, we classified these features into the domains of knowledge management as defined by Lee et al [11] and Goh et al [13]. This included: knowledge access features (mechanisms through which users access the portal and its information); knowledge creation features (processes whereby user information is captured and then stored and used for portal providers and users); and knowledge transfer and exchange features (mechanisms that allow the portal providers to foster user-to-user and provider-to-user sharing of knowledge) [11].…”

“…Portals have evolved from simply being an efficient web tool for the one-way retrieval and transfer of information, to a platform for two-way collaboration and exchange among people in different organisations or professions, i.e. knowledge portals or knowledge exchange portals (KEPs) [9-11]. …”

“…It appears that KEPs can facilitate knowledge management through three core activities, depending on their available design features and functions [11-13]: (i) knowledge access, by providing a single integrated point of access to a variety of relevant organisational or topic-specific information; (ii) knowledge creation, by creating and maintaining knowledge directories about portal generated content; and (iii) knowledge transfer and exchange, by facilitating information sharing and distribution and providing collaborative features that help to foster communities of practice.…”