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Top1. Introduction
Confronted with demands of care quality, optimality, dynamicity and complexity, medicine is obliged to well manage their medical knowledge which is in increasing (Chen et al., 2011; Kim, 2014; Kothari et al., 2011; Panahi et al., 2012; Stroetmann and Aisenbrey, 2012). For reaching this objective, each healthcare organization must integrate a healthcare knowledge management (Charlet, 2002; Nadeem et al., 2012; Olaolorun and Oladejo, 2012).
Medical or healthcare knowledge is created through different modes like communication, exchanging and sharing knowledge (Ting et al., 2010) between practitioners, interrogation examination and assessment stored in medical record and other knowledge related to experience and skills (Charlet, 2002; Chen, 2013; Henry, 2010; Kothari et al., 2012; Tsui et al., 2014). This knowledge can be classified into two types: explicit knowledge which is easy to identify and locate. It is stored in good practices, theoretical knowledge, medical records and others medical papers whereas the second type is related to tacit knowledge which is embedded in healthcare professionals’ mind. It represents their competencies, their experiences, their talents and their know-how. This type of knowledge is difficult to locate and not always accessible.
Taking into account these points, healthcare organizations are becoming aware of tacit knowledge (Abidi et al., 2005) and grant a special attention to tacit knowledge to avoid its miss-use and loss (Erden, 2008; Henry, 2010; Kinchin et al., 2008; Kothari et al., 2012; Mahroeian and Forozia, 2012; Parpandel, 2013; Polanyi, 1967; Reinders, 2010; Wang and Tian, 2012).
Many works in the literature are proposed to demonstrate the importance of knowledge management and knowledge engineering in medicine. (Hojabri et al., 2012, Al-Khasawneh and Hijazi, 2014, Pietro et al., 2014) stress the impact of using telemedicine on knowledge management in healthcare organizations. They propose a new framework and a model to explain how knowledge sharing and organizational learning occur in telemedical practices. (Edenius et al., 2010) explain how knowledge can be managed across boundaries when implementing innovations in the healthcare sector (healthcare quality register). The findings of this study describe knowledge through three levels (syntactic level, semantic level and pragmatic level. (Tian, 2011) improves knowledge management between primary and secondary healthcare by using e-referral (an electronically transmitted referral message) which facilitates the generation, capturing and sharing patients’ information between primary and secondary health providers.
In the literature, most of works proposed don’t give a meticulous and clear definition of knowledge although many disciplines talk about knowledge: in philosophy (Fantl, 2012; Schwartz, 2011), in strategic management (Pesqueux, 2010), in knowledge management (Grant, 1997; Kogut and Zander, 1992), in knowledge engineering and in others disciplines.