Health informatics professionals are increasingly called upon to help manage knowledge in organizations, beyond conventional information processing. A wide range of information technologies, such as collaboration and social software, enterprise repositories, knowledge-based or expert systems, software agents, as well as traditional information systems, are being used to support work in organizations. This course examines knowledge management from a health system perspective. Notions of knowledge in the management literature and in the information systems area are reviewed. Modelling techniques that can be used during systems analysis in the context of organizational knowledge management are examined.

The course aims to expose students to the issues of knowledge management in health organization and across health systems, and to provide opportunities to learn and apply modelling and analytical techniques to understand the use of various types of information technologies in meeting organizational knowledge management needs.

Objectives: at the end of this course, students will be able to: 1) Analyze and identify knowledge management needs in health settings. 2) Apply modeling techniques to analyze organizational processes from a knowledge management perspective as well as information systems perspective. 3) Analyze and identify potential IT systems solutions to address knowledge management needs. 4) Explain and illustrate potential application of ontologies in the context of knowledge management. 5) Describe and explain knowledge management concepts in relation to the application of information technologies in the health system. 6) Apply an integrated framework to analyze knowledge management across policy, interoperability, and technology domains. 7) Identify key stakeholders in the system and describe their unique and common knowledge management needs.