Knowledge Management Processes to Support Evidence Based Practice in Healthcare – a Swedish Case Study

The primary and basic component of healthcare is information. When practitioners make decisions as well as treat and care for patients they interpret patient specific data based on evidence based medical knowledge. This process is complex as evidence is infrequently available in a form that can be acted upon at the time of care. Therefore the aim of this paper is to (1) explore how primary care, secondary care and municipality care in Sweden work with the process of managing knowledge, and (2) explore how practitioners experience access to medical knowledge. The results demonstrate major deficiencies in in the knowledge management (KM) process of the organizations. The KM process is not systematically reflected in the organizational culture, strategy or in practice, which causes major difficulties for practitioners to work according to evidence based medicine