Healthcare knowledge management aims to ensure that health knowledge is produced, organised, shared and used to support informed decisions, clinical practice and service quality. A 2026 publication in BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making identified six strategies and 12 models for knowledge management in health contexts. The models range from broad organisational frameworks to more specific approaches for telemedicine, clinical development, haemodialysis quality improvement, laboratory services and traditional medicines. Across these settings, implementation depends on human expertise, technology, organisational culture and usable systems.
Core Strategies for Managing Knowledge
Knowledge management does not have a single universally accepted definition, but common descriptions focus on discovering, organising, managing, storing, disseminating and applying knowledge to improve organisational effectiveness. In healthcare, these processes include acquiring, registering, retrieving, disseminating and applying health knowledge to improve care quality and decision-making. Health knowledge management aims to provide timely, effective and usable knowledge for healthcare professionals, patients and individuals.
The strategies fall into several linked categories. Human-centred strategies focus on the role of employees and professional interaction. Technology-centred strategies focus on information systems and digital tools that support storage, organisation and sharing. Integrated strategies combine these perspectives by recognising that technology can support knowledge management, but knowledge remains closely connected to human judgement, communication and practice.
Personal knowledge management concerns the way individuals organise and integrate information acquired through intellectual activity, reading and interaction with others. It includes creating, evaluating, recognising, organising, storing, cataloguing, indexing and retrieving information and knowledge. Collective knowledge management focuses on knowledge shared by groups, teams, organisations and communities. It supports group objectives through processes that identify, validate, store and refine the knowledge held by employees across an organisation. Collaborative knowledge management extends knowledge creation, access and use across networks beyond organisational boundaries.
Models Across Health Settings
Health knowledge management models cover a broad range of settings and purposes. The SECI model, developed by Nonaka and Takeuchi, provides a basis for a telemedicine model in Indonesia through socialisation, externalisation, combination and internalisation. The model guides the identification of features for a knowledge management portal, with validation needed before design work begins. A public hospital process model uses knowledge schemes, scanning, storage, use and transfer. These elements address how clinicians value knowledge, seek information, retain knowledge, apply it in practice and transfer it between knowledge owners and knowledge seekers.
Clinical knowledge management places culture and continuous improvement at the base of the framework, supported by people, business processes, content and technology. A clinical development programme depends on knowledge sharing, knowledge acquisition, collaboration across functions and geography, governance, infrastructure, measurement and change management. Technology supports storage, retrieval and access, but it does not determine the focus, strategy or approach.
A haemodialysis quality improvement model uses knowledge identification and capture, structuring, sharing and application across preparation, implementation and evaluation. After implementation in a non-profit private hospital, staff job satisfaction and patient satisfaction improved, three patient quality-of-life domains increased at three and six months and hypotension per haemodialysis session decreased. The Knowledge Management Infrastructure in Healthcare model combines social and technical tools through collaboration infrastructure, organisational memory, human asset infrastructure, knowledge transfer networks and business intelligence infrastructure.
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Patient-Centred Implementation Challenges
Total knowledge management in healthcare focuses on tacit knowledge and a human-centric approach. Its phases are initiate, share, establish and exploit. The approach starts with healthcare professionals’ skills and daily activities, builds a setting for tacit knowledge sharing, extends sharing through organisational communities and uses the resulting culture to improve healthcare delivery. The phases operate as a continuous feedback loop that refines earlier stages.
Teleconsulting knowledge management combines ubiquity principles, cost-effectiveness, specialised human resources, communication technologies and knowledge exploitation. It uses information and knowledge technologies to support access to healthcare services through the internet and other networks, without physical presence with doctors. A quality-focused healthcare model organises knowledge management into enablers, intermediate outcomes and outcomes. Its enablers are finding, sharing and developing knowledge. These processes support decision-making, sense-making and learning, with outcomes linked to organisational performance, quality, products or services, productivity and workplace satisfaction.
Several models emphasise context-specific design. Chinese medicines knowledge management uses a four-layer model covering the network and computer system layer, data layer, knowledge services layer and application layer. A conceptual healthcare framework defines knowledge as a combination of information, experience, context, interpretation and reflection and places knowledge production, use, refinement and social context at the centre. An online system for clinical laboratories gives healthcare professionals and laboratory personnel access to decision-making information during the request-report cycle and supports rapid updates, content editing and change records.
Knowledge management in healthcare brings together people, technology, processes and organisational culture. The strategies identified include human and information technology approaches, personal and collective approaches and coding and personalisation. The models span hospitals, telemedicine, clinical development, haemodialysis, laboratory services, nursing, healthcare organisations and traditional medicines. Across these contexts, effective implementation depends on collaborative environments, strong leadership, user-friendly systems and clear approaches to capturing, organising, sharing and applying knowledge. Persistent barriers include resistance to change, limited resources, integration difficulties, ongoing support needs and data privacy and quality concerns.
Source: BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making
Image Credit: iStock
References:
Ghalavand H, Shirshahi S, Amani F et al. (2026) Knowledge management strategies and models in health context: a systematic review. BMC Med Inform Decis Mak. doi: 10.1186/s12911-026-03559-1
