Adopting Proactive Knowledge Use as an Innovation: The Case of a Knowledge Management System in Rheumatology

The aim of the study is to present a tentative framework to explore and investigate the drivers and barriers of adoption of the innovation of proactive knowledge use in connection to a knowledge management system (KMS) in health care. Semi-structured interviews were performed with champion implementers and physicians using the KMS along with a document analysis depicting significant events of the implementation process. The findings from the study suggested that drivers of the innovation were the characteristics of change agents, quality improvement, budget control and knowledge brought to the physician-patient dialogue by the KMS. In particular, there were indications of the KMS facilitating the process of making tacit knowledge explicit in the physician-patient dialogue. Identified barriers towards the innovation were resistance from clinical management, lack of motivation to share knowledge, lack of time and perceived flaws in the interface and compilation of data in the KMS.