Knowledge Management and the New Configurations of Health Markets

Abstract

Throughout this book, we make a strong case for complex society. Complex society is an entity which becomes conceivable by deploying the concepts and methods of complexity theory. In this chapter, we argue that both complex society and complexity theory affect how health policy is formulated and planned, as well as how knowledge management functions are implemented in the field of service ecosystems constituted by public, private and non-governmental healthcare organisations. Organisational knowledge management has attracted considerable attention in recent years in the fields of public policy, public management and health policy in particular. Nonetheless, there are few widely shared views according to which the term itself is defined, much less a consensus on how best to apply it in healthcare service delivery. In this chapter, the role of organisational knowledge is explored (by making a distinction, for instance, between the use and exchange value of information). This chapter discusses how to manage knowledge internally and externally in order to achieve organisational success in healthcare services. We propose that intelligent knowledge leadership has to address how health organisations and service systems overcome their fundamental knowledge problems, and these problems have to be approached from the service-user point of view. Until this problem—and the constitution of two-dimensional horizontal accountability addressing the collaboration of service providers and the value produced for the service users addressed in the upcoming chapters in this book—is explored and defined, organisations run the risk of addressing the symptoms rather than the causes. Since we live in an age of a complex society and complex public policies, uncertainty refers to a lack of information.