Abstract
This chapter explores the individual competencies presented by various healthcare executive organizations as being important for healthcare leaders to emulate in the exchange of information and knowledge. These competencies provide a set of tools that healthcare leaders can use to make their organizations successful in the healthcare systems and knowledge management (KM) environment. Several possible ways these can be instilled within the academic setting are presented. Systems and KM paradigms, such as organizational learning and memory, are superordinate metaphors that provide an approach to analyzing organizational capability through an understanding of processes occurring in healthcare organizations.
TopWhat Is A Competency?
Welton (2007) discussed the lack of clarity in the use of the term “competency” as it is used in the healthcare management field. Competencies as used by the various organizations and agencies in the United States that address healthcare management may be framed as stand alone skills, knowledge and abilities that are generic and demonstrable (ILS definition). Competencies may also be presented as organized systems, or “domains”. What is important is that whatever model is used, that it give necessary direction to educators and senior managers as to what to include in educational programs, or, for the senior manager, what to expect of the newly-graduated manager.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Competency: As used by the various organizations and agencies in the United States that address healthcare management, a competency may be framed as stand alone skills, knowledge and abilities that are generic and demonstrable.
Systems Theory: According to systems theory, ‘the whole is more than the sum of its parts’ due to its existence being maintained only through the mutual interaction of its components and not merely comprised of its individual components.
Information Technology: Technology used in the collection, statistical and non-statistical analysis, and summarizing of management and health data for decision-making.
Systems Thinking: Critical to this definition is the term ‘interaction’, in that systems thinking is a form of analysis that goes beyond specific causes and effects to the discernment of hidden patterns of behaviors and underlying systemic interrelationships.
Structuration Theory (ST): A social theory model that encompasses paradoxical concepts is which serves to address the complex and relational aspects of the interactions between stakeholders and IT.
Domains: Competencies presented as organized systems.
Knowledge Management: Knowledge management provides a multidisciplinary concept that operationalizes the structuration model. Knowledge management systems in healthcare are primarily concerned with how medical stakeholders perceive, process, and communicate information flowing from activities relating to medical practice, medical education, medical research, and medical information dissemination.