Companies Struggle to Pass Knowledge: HMC Helps Hospitals Do it Seamlessly

In a Wall Street Journal article entitled "Companies Struggle To Pass On Knowledge That Workers Acquire" (see WSJ.com), Scott Thurm reports that employees learn essential cost-reduction strategies by experience, but most companies do not have ways to collect, store, and distribute those strageties.

For example, a package-delivery courier told him that saving time in delivering packages required knowing whether to start deliveries at the top of the building or at the bottom, which depended on the time of the day (whether employees were going to work or leaving).

This cost-saving information would be prove profitable to the package-delivery company if it could be passed on to its other couriers.

In healthcare, what if the experience you need is in another hospital? Maybe that person you need to talk to is in your health system but maybe not. How do you create a water cooler where there isn’t one now? HMC does exactly that---

Thurm goes on to report that the two methods of idea sharing - informal interactions and online databases - have so far failed to rise to the challenge. Informal interactions are limited in scope, and online databases are often not used.

HMC solves the challenge of capturing, storing, and sharing cost-saving ides by:

• Coaching Partners how to share information within and between hospitals, expanding the knowledge source from which to pull
• Making knowledge exchange mandatory and employees accountable by dashboards
• Creating & directing employee knowledge communities that meet regularly to generate and share knowledge
• Filtering successful ideas and practices out of every day interactions and making them easily searchable in the HMC KnowledgeWeb.