What is Constructionist Knowledge Perspective

During the last two decades there has been a revolution in both healthcare and information technology. As a result of the advances in healthcare, tremendous progress has been made in increasing life expectancy and in disease control. Simultaneously, advances in information technology has made possible for a healthcare stakeholder to have access to almost all existing health information available. However, as a result of these advances, physicians and other healthcare stakeholders are facing an information overload and, in some cases, paradoxical information. This chapter presents evidence for the fact that the inability of healthcare professionals to deal effectively with the information explosion has started to have an impact in terms of: (a) lives lost and affected adversely and (b) financial terms. Furthermore, this chapter argues that the healthcare sector is ignoring the potential impact of two new emerging revolutions (biomedical knowledge and genetic engineering revolutions) which have the potential to make irrevocable changes in the very nature of healthcare processes. This chapter presents evidence of how the synergistic interaction between the biomedical knowledge and genetic engineering revolutions is made further accentuating the information explosion in healthcare. This chapter then analyses the potential of knowledge management (KM) in alleviating the information overload in healthcare. The chapter examines the linkages between the building blocks of both: (a) KM solutions and (b) the process of medical diagnosis and treatment. The outcome of this analysis (i.e., examinations of these linkages) provides new insights to healthcare professionals on how to adopt KM to deal with the information crisis in healthcare.