title: Knowledge management in healthcare: towards 'knowledge-driven' decision-support services.
abstract: In this paper, we highlight the involvement of Knowledge Management in a healthcare enterprise. We argue that the 'knowledge quotient' of a healthcare enterprise can be enhanced by procuring diverse facets of knowledge from the seemingly placid healthcare data repositories, and subsequently operationalising the procured knowledge to derive a suite of Strategic Healthcare Decision-Support Services that can impact strategic decision-making, planning and management of the healthcare enterprise. In this paper, we firstly present a reference Knowledge Management environment-a Healthcare Enterprise Memory-with the functionality to acquire, share and operationalise the various modalities of healthcare knowledge. Next, we present the functional and architectural specification of a Strategic Healthcare Decision-Support Services Info-structure, which effectuates a synergy between knowledge procurement (vis-à-vis Data Mining) and knowledge operationalisation (vis-à-vis Knowledge Management) techniques to generate a suite of strategic knowledge-driven decision-support services. In conclusion, we argue that the proposed Healthcare Enterprise Memory is an attempt to rethink the possible sources of leverage to improve healthcare delivery, hereby providing a valuable strategic planning and management resource to healthcare policy makers.
authors.affiliation: Health Informatics Research Group, School of Computer Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia, 11800 Penang, Malaysia.
authors.forename: S S
authors.initials: SS
authors.lastname: Abidi
mesh_terms: D002983:Clinical Competence; D003660:Decision Support Systems, Management; D003695:Delivery of Health Care / Q000458:organization & administration*; D005103:Expert Systems; D006801:Humans; D019451:Information Management / Q000379:methods*; D019359:Knowledge