Improving the productivity of the
American Health Care System is the key
objective of the HIPAA(HIPAA, Public
Law104-191) signed by President Clinton on
21st August 1996. Specifically this Act
encourages the development of information
systems based on the exchange of standard
management and financial data using EDI and
also requires organisations exchanging
transactions for health care to follow national
implementation guidelines for EDI established
for this purpose. To date, while the health care
industry overall readily embraces the latest
technologies to enable better clinical practices,
it has been slow to adopt IS/IT(information
systems/information technology) that addresses
the non-clinical aspects of health care delivery.
HIPAA clearly underscores the strategic benefit
to all health care players to begin to embrace eknowledge
management systems.
This macro-level paradigm shift also has
significant implications upon the micro-level
processes of assimilation and implementation of
knowledge management concepts and
techniques [1]; i.e., in order to have efficient
external information portability, internal
systems must be used to gather , store and
process required information and knowledge.
We contend that it is in such an environment
that the use of knowledge management systems
(KMS), in particular using the automated health
medical record as an e-KMS will lead to
strategic benefits. We outline some of these
benefits by presenting the case of MARS a
sophisticated e-KMS designed and
implemented by Kaiser Permanenete Ohio in
the 1990s.