The Business Values of Patient Knowledge Management (PKM) in the Healthcare Industry

Today, healthcare has become a progressive industry with novel techniques, approaches and findings in this field quickly being evaluated and improved. One of these approaches is patient-centered care (PCC), which is defined essentially as an approach that respects and responds to individual patient's preferences, needs and values. As such, PCC concept focuses not only on the disease, but also on leveraging specific information of a patient. PCC approach is therefore going to enlarge the role of patients and families in the process of clinical decision making. Still, the authors are observing the lack of innovation in this particular domain. In this paper, the authors develop the concept of patient knowledge management (PKM) based on customer knowledge management and PCC approaches. PKM creates many values such as decreasing opportunity costs and treatment costs, aiding patient decision making to be efficient and effective, as well as creating new knowledge and developing new treatment methods.