The Importance of Medical Knowledge Management

Being an expert feels good. Being the go-to person for an answer proves that you are indispensable to an organization. Your value is that no one else could possibly do what you do or replace you. You are too important for anything bad to happen. This is why the organization needs you, right? Wrong. This mentality is crippling, toxic, and disastrous for a company.

Companies will gravitate towards people and professionals that are highly specialized and experts in certain subject matter. This approach can work, but only within certain functions, such as an academic expert or government official. If a company consists of a workforce that treats information and knowledge as a “finders keepers” game, your team will spend more time infighting, getting pulled off track, and eventually burning out trying to constantly seek answers from a select few. This isn’t a healthy way to do business. You need a better way to get everyone on the same page.

Having experts on your team is important. Even more important is that experts ability to teach, share, and disseminate the knowledge that they have obtained. In modern companies, a person’s value lies in being able to teach others, not having others come to them for information. This is formally called medical knowledge management and it has many forms.

Shadowing, apprenticeships, libraries, and mentoring are all ways to extract the expertise of a particular person. Once systems and workflows are in place, all users begin to benefit from the reduced time it takes to find an answer or solution. This allows information and knowledge to flow freely amongst all levels at an organization. Entry level team members can access the same information as the c-suite, creating a tighter, more unified company and work environment. A company will also need a cultural shift that emphasizes this new teamwork approach. Having the foundations in place doesn’t mean a lot if no one uses it.

Within Freedom Healthworks, we take great care to keep all documents, projects, and initiatives housed in a shared repository that anyone on our team can access. Knowledge management is also the reason why we created our Freedom DPC Academy. It is imperative that our team is able to extract the expertise within our minds and share it with each and every physician looking to make the smart move into direct primary care.

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