Improve Knowledge Transfer and Sharing Practices among Service-providers in the Context of E-health: A case study of U-CARE Community

Abstract: As more and more convenience technology brings to human’s life by breaking through the obstacles of geography and psychology, e-health is being accepted by increasing number of people. It shows great potential to decrease the gap between the needs and satisfaction. However, the potential of e-health is far from being noticed. Knowledge shows inevitable advantages in different domains and of course the same in the health care industry. There are many different aspects that can be investigated and improved to reach the purpose, but in this dissertation, we aims to explore how to achieve a better knowledge transfer and sharing among e-health service-providers in order to create high-quality services that will be delivered to the patients. In general, U-CARE community is the one case that studied in this dissertation to explore how to identify knowledge transfer & sharing practices and what techniques can be used to improve it in the context of e-health. A theoretical framework from Etienne Wenger is applied here to help the author understand community well. Further analysis and discussion are based both on existing theories derived from literature review and empirical data obtained in interviews. The main contribution from the author and conclusion in this dissertation are summarized in a format of framework concerning useful techniques and methods (shown in Figure 9), which involves knowledge transfer and sharing practices related to formal/informal meetings, face-to-face communication, coordinator, online platform, IT tools, change management, documentation management, tracking of requirements & decisions, library of FAQ and personalization. The transferred and shared knowledge investigated in this dissertation is “back-office” data, not directly related to patient data, so the protection of patient personal privacy is not a consideration in this dissertation.