THE EFFECTS OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT INFRASTRUCTURE CAPABILITY ONKNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENTEFFECTIVENESS OF DOCTORS: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY

Today, Knowledge Management (KM) plays a pivotal role in the organizations especially in Information Technology and Manufacturing Sectors, for achieving sustainable competitive advantage. Hospitals are highly knowledge intensive area since it comprises of highly qualified knowledge workers and it gain tremendous knowledge in each specialty. However, the healthcare knowledge is largely underutilized due to lack of availability of specific knowledge at the point of care. Knowledge is of little or no value if it is not available when needed. In order to implement the KM practices effectively, hospitals need to assimilate KM capabilities namely KM infrastructure capability and KM process capability. The purpose of this paper is to identify the various elements of KM infrastructure capability prevailing in the hospitals. It also attempts to explore the effects of KM infrastructure capability on KM effectiveness of doctors. The study is carried out in 4 private multi-specialty hospitals with over 500 beds, in 2 Indian Metro Cities i.e., Chennai and Bangalore. The primary data is collected from 60 doctors practicing in various clinical specialties, through face-to-face questionnaire survey. Multiple regression analysis was adopted. The findings show that organizational culture and organizational structure have significant effect on KM effectiveness of doctors. This paper provides hospital managers with insights into how to develop and sustain KM infrastructure capability for stimulating KM process capability as well as enhancing KM effectiveness of doctors. The results of the study will hopefully contribute for future work in the area since this paper addresses an important and not researched issue on the KM-enabled doctors' performance.