Towards developing learning healthcare organizations: A transdisciplinary T2 research study approaching the complexity of managing healthcare professionals' knowledge-sharing

In today's era of globalized learning economy, the ability to integrate, share, and disseminate knowledge across functional silos in healthcare organizations constitutes a major challenge. This presentation considers knowledge-sharing practices (artefact-mediated, experience-mediated, and resource-mediated knowledge-sharing) and the ways for their success in order to improving patient care and the working lives of healthcare professionals at a time of changing roles and expectations. Healthcare organizations of today increasingly recognize the need to support the practice of knowledge-sharing among their ²employees.² As a consequence, researchers and professionals in patient/clinical/managerial/policy decision-making environments are collaboratively searching, testing and using different proactive interventions to facilitate knowledge-sharing. However, success depends of a myriad of factors. This study is a practice-oriented translational research (T2) study which deals with the complexity of managing health-related knowledge-sharing and allows to better understand the potential and updating conditions of knowledge-sharing management in healthcare organizations. The objectives of the presentation are: (1) to discuss different knowledge-sharing practices, supported by ICT, (2) to analyze knowledge-sharing practices in a champion-organization, (3) to present a ²whole-of-healthcare-organization² knowledge-sharing framework. This research is an action research based on Checkland' SSM (Soft Systems Methodology), drawing on a non-linear perspective that conceives the knowledge-sharing as accomplishing changes not only in technical, but also, and primarily in cognitive, social and organizational fronts. We take as the point of departure that healthcare knowledge is social constructs and that the processes of knowledge-sharing (acquiring knowledge; reusing knowledge; developing new knowledge) are equally social processes and organizational changes. Linking knowledge-sharing with organizational learning is useful as it connects the different levels within a healthcare organization: individual, group/team/community, and organizational. This link also constitutes a fruitful way of approaching the complexity of managing knowledge-sharing amongst healthcare professionals, and mapping out the future direction that institutionalized healthcare knowledge-sharing might take.