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. 2019 Mar 28;16(7):1114.
doi: 10.3390/ijerph16071114.

Modeling the Pathways of Knowledge Management Towards Social and Economic Outcomes of Health Organizations

Ion Popa  1 , Simona Cătălina Ștefan  2
Affiliations

Modeling the Pathways of Knowledge Management Towards Social and Economic Outcomes of Health Organizations

Ion Popa et al. Int J Environ Res Public Health. .

Abstract

Despite the increasing emphasis placed on knowledge management (KM) by the business sector and the common belief that creating, acquiring, sharing, and the use of knowledge enable individuals, teams, and communities to achieve superior performance, within the healthcare context, there is still room from improvements from both the theoretical and empirical perspectives. The purpose of this paper is to outline the contribution of KM process to the social- and economic-related outcomes in the context of health organizations. Given the theoretical approach on the considered concepts and their relationships, a conceptual model and seven research hypotheses were proposed. The empirical data were provided by a cross-sectional investigation including 459 medical and nonmedical employees of Romanian heath organizations, selected by a mixed method sampling procedure. A partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) approach was selected to provide information on the relevance and significance of the first- and second-order constructs, test the hypotheses, and conduct an importance performance matrix analysis. The PLS-SEM estimation showed positive and significant relationships between KM process and quality of healthcare, and organizational-level social and economic outcomes. Moreover, the research results provided evidences for the complex complementary mediation of the quality of healthcare and social-related outcomes on the relationships between KM process and social and economic outcomes. The theoretical and managerial implications are discussed and suggestions for future research are provided at the end of the paper.

Keywords: PLS-SEM; economic outcomes; healthcare; knowledge management process; quality of care; social outcomes.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Conceptual model and hypotheses.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Measurement model computed with SmartPLS 3.2.7 (GmbH, Bönningstedt, Germany) [72]. Note: KAch—knowledge acquisition; KSha—knowledge sharing; KUtil—knowledge utilization; KMP—knowledge management process; QHS—Quality of health services; SOut—social-related outcomes; EOut—economic-related outcomes.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Importance-Performance Matrix Analysis (IPMA) for the target constructs: (a) quality of healthcare, (b) social outcomes, and (c) economic outcomes. Source: authors computation with SmartPls 3.2.7 (GmbH, Bönningstedt, Germany) [72] and IBM SPSS 25.0 (IBM Corp., Armonk, NY, USA) [55].
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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