Project overview
Health care industry is characterized for a high degree of innovation, where important changes are expected, leading to challenges such as: facing new health problems, assuring citizen’s satisfaction in complex sanitary systems, offering services in a prioritized and equitable way, and advancing in the idea that people are responsible for taking care of their own health.
Strategic knowledge management offers a major opportunity for applying connectivity, content and commerce in order to improve and modernize sanitary services, while maintaining costs and increasing operative efficiency.
In this regard, the implementation of Home Care Units (HCU) allows a reduction close to a 25% of sanitary expenses related to the move of the patient to his/her home as well as all the related actions and procedures that are normally developed within sanitary facilities.
Nevertheless, the implementation of HCU implies organizational changes in sanitary institutions so that home attention to patients may have a relevant position, in order to: reserve adequate timing for programmed home care, make best use of clinical histories, and establish mechanisms for urgent problems resolution as well as relations with other professional colleagues in different services, among other aims.
The present project objective is to approach the development of HCU from a knowledge management perspective. In this attempt, we will revise politics, objectives and aims of HCU from four main axes in health care services (managers, doctors, nurses, and patients). This research will also explore and highlight how a knowledge management program can contribute, among other issues, to improve the quality of the services given.
The final result of the project will offer a protocol articulating the necessary measures to make the best use of existing knowledge and to make it available to all those agents that may require it and can make good use of it.