Fostering knowledge assets in healthcare with the KMI model

Facing relentless pressure to provide cost effective high quality healthcare, greater emphasis is being placed on minimal invasive surgical and diagnostic techniques. Such techniques necessitate the confluence of advances in technology with highly skilled expertise of multidisciplinary teams of healthcare providers. At the micro level these interventions appear to be successful in the short term, however it is likely that their full potential is not being realised. This is because of the lack of systematic knowledge capture throughout various stages of the process. This paper discusses the benefits of adopting knowledge management infrastructure model as a way of making explicit critical knowledge assets. Case data from a spine unit is provided to illustrate the power of such an approach. Copyright © 2007 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.