The Potential of Crowdsourcing in the Health Care Industry

A Classification Of Health Care Industry Challenges

In February 2002, the then US Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld (2002) used the terms the “known knowns,” the “known unknowns” and the “unknown unknowns” when discussing the situation in Iraq. Later, philosopher Slavoj Zizek (2004) added another term, the “unknown knowns” as a fourth classification. While, both Rumsfeld and Zizek used the terms to discuss the US involvement in Iraq, this classification scheme is used as a springboard in our chapter to classify the myriad problems facing the global health care industry. These four classes allow us to evaluate the different types of challenges facing the health care industry and help evaluate how modern methods of knowledge sharing in crowdsourcing can provide solutions to these problems.