A Discussion on the Role of Knowledge Management in Aged Care

Knowledge Management is a new tool in the Information Systems area and in recent years many articles have been written to highlight the importance of different forms of knowledge, how to capture, integrate and then benefit from them. In aged care, knowledge management can play a vital role as medical history needs to be carried over through different stages of a patient’s life to guarantee service. This discussion paper provides a brief introduction to the role of knowledge management in the aged care domain. Introduction In the past 15 years, healthcare systems have undergone some major changes both locally and globally. The driving force for these changes include demand for services, quality of services, reduction in cost, economization, developments in information technology and increased competition (Awad & Ghaziri, 2004). These changes have affected aged care, who are in the business of providing healthcare to aged people. In many cases, there are strong links between aged care and healthcare as the medical records are transformed from healthcare to aged care for service purposes. Given the current status of our population, it appears that there is a demand for aged care services in Australia and the current aged care providers are looking for ways through which the aged care operations can be effectively managed. Many organizations in the management domain have understood the importance of ‘knowledge’ in order to enhance management capacity to compete and adapt to a changing environment. This has generated a number of models that are suitable to varying contexts of management. Inferences collected from various studies, ranging from a variety of service related industry such as medical, law, IT, engineering have clearly indicated that the inclusion of Knowledge Management (KM) in organizations would make organizations responsive by improving the organizational knowledge, skills, and abilities to achieve advancements in service delivery (Davis, 1998; Fayyad et al, 1996; Liaw et al., 2001). These studies state that knowledge management concepts applied to health care would benefit this sector as the health care is predominantly service oriented. Further, many studies agree that knowledge management has a profound effect on the ability to create, disseminate and share knowledge throughout the organization and health care organizations would greatly benefit by these characteristics as they are service oriented. An anatomy of aged care organizations in Australia indicates that the organizational structure is hierarchical, decision making is often central and the organizational model often slows down the overall processes involved in the decision making. The health care and aged care problems are often related to existing confusion, necessity for an information standard and good organizational structure can all have an affect ranging from personal and professional identity, competence, responsibility, accountability, satisfaction, and motivation of this service industry. Some of these problems can be alleviated by the inclusion of knowledge management in aged care organizations.