Assessment of Hospital Websites as Potential KM Tools: A Study of Indian Hospitals

Knowledge Management (KM) as a concept has been around for quite a while now, and information technology has played an important role in advancing this concept by making knowledge more easily searchable, identifiable and available for sharing. Most of the businesses today have realized the power of Internet and have developed websites to provide information to their stakeholders. In fact, the use of Internet for knowledge sharing has gained prominence in the last decade. Many studies have defined Internet portals as one-stop solution to the information problem created by the World Wide Web that increases the access to information in a specific domain (Kotorov and Hsu, 2001). In the healthcare sector as well, health websites are a norm for hospitals. This paper looks at how the websites of hospitals are being utilized by patients, and whether they have the potential to be used as effective KM tools for patient management. The websites of selected hospitals were thoroughly examined and rated according to a predetermined rating list based on the research model used by Lee et al. (2007) and Gruca and Wakefield (2002). The features were divided into three generations: Generation 1, Generation 2 and Generation 3. The findings show that the Indian hospitals are not using Generation 3 and Generation 2 features on their websites, which means that the potential to exchange and share knowledge is very high on the websites. And if more interactivity is introduced, these websites can be effective tools for knowledge sharing and management.