Applying the Practice Theoretical Perspective to Healthcare Knowledge Management

A primary focus of healthcare knowledge management is to provide clinical practitioners with appropriate knowledge resources for making the best patient care decisions. Over the years, advances in information technology have enabled a knowledge-rich healthcare system with accessible databases and repositories. However, healthcare knowledge remains largely underutilized, and often wrongly utilized, in patient care decision-making. As greater considerations of social and organizational contexts began to emerge, concepts and techniques of the practice theoretical perspective have gained relevance as a tool for providing a rich set of findings required to making sense of how healthcare knowledge is utilized at the point of care and for designing systems to support that use. In this chapter, we describe a research effort at developing an e-health system for clinical decision support and knowledge sharing across organizational and geographical boundaries using the practice theoretical approach. The chapter concludes with a roadmap for the critical goal of designing healthcare knowledge management systems and user interfaces that meet the information, collaboration and workflow needs of healthcare professionals at the point of care.