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knowledge conversions. In that community, the consumers (or patients) ended up
publishing an article on the side effects of Gleevec. In other words, tacit knowl-
edge regarding the treatment and its side effects were collectively converted into
explicit knowledge in the form of a research paper written by the consumers. These
and similar such examples show that healthcare organizations that provide such
online communities and discussion forums for their patients and medical experts
can support shared or collective knowledge creation through both socialization and
externalization. More importantly, the new knowledge that is created can lead to
improvements in existing healthcare services (or development of new services) that
healthcare organizations can further develop and deploy.
Thus, based on the above discussion, we can conclude that the network model
of knowledge management that manifest in the form of online health com-
munities and forums would enhance the opportunities for consumer knowledge
creation through knowledge socialization and knowledge externalization. Hence,
the following proposition:
Proposition P1:
The network model of knowledge management implemented in the
form of online health communities will enhance the extent of consumer knowledge
creation through knowledge socialization and knowledge externalization.
8.6.2 Health Websites and Knowledge Combination/
Internalization
Most healthcare organizations also possess several static repositories of knowledge
(e.g., patient medical records, treatment and medical procedure details, physician
expertise details, etc.). Depending on the type of the healthcare organization (e.g.,
academic/research institution, HMO, profit/non-profit hospitals, community cen-
ters), it could also be a repository for other types of explicit knowledge, such as
the latest medical research findings related to a disease, insurance information,
treatment quality and pricing information, patient education literature, etc.
We argue that a Web-based implementation of the repository model of knowl-
edge management will facilitate consumer service innovation through knowledge
combination and knowledge internalization.
As noted previously, there are several consumer health information websites such
as WebMD and Mayo clinic that provide comprehensive information on diseases A-
Z. These types of databases clearly support explicit-explicit knowledge conversion
(or combination). Consumers can acquire information from multiple or separate
database and combine them to create new knowledge that help them in dealing with
specific diseases or creating/improving service aimed at specific healthcare issues.
The Web-based health databases also support internalization as consumers can
acquire specific explicit knowledge and contextualize such information - i.e., situ-
ate and reinterpret the information in their unique context - thereby creating tacit
knowledge or internalizing it. This could create promising opportunities for con-
sumers to make suggestions that relate to implementing valuable services that they
have encountered elsewhere.
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