Information Sharing Issues

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Another significant area of concern and research on information sharing also takes place in the sharing of information between health organisations. On a more recent attempt of information sharing effort, for instance, is outlined by one of the main aims of the National Health Service in the UK to develop an electronic patient record of which shall be made available to all health service providers, from general practitioners to hospital clinicians. This effort has not come by without critics or supports. Despite the fact that opportunity for opting out of the system is being given to the patients, such effort has clearly been the subject of controversy, either promoting, for instance, cases for (Watson, 2006) and against (Halamka, 2006) found …show more content…

In the UK, it was found that inter-agency information sharing to be highly problematic, given the personal nature of patient records: the failure of health agencies and professionals to communicate effectively with social work departments in relation to child abuse has been one of the considerable concerns to count for. In health care industry, sharing patients’ information can be problematic as there are many other agencies involves (inter-agencies) such as on child abuse. Thorough investigation after investigation has led to the attention towards this problem of child abuse (as well as related problems of communication failures between both of these agencies and the police), …show more content…

The distinction between information sharing and involuntary information reporting could be explained by volition. Therefore, Davenport (1995) defines information sharing as ‘voluntary act of making information available to others… acwhere share could pass the information on, but does not have to’ (p.5). In prior study, Morishima (1991) found that in the inter-organisational context, voluntary information sharing is positively related to profitability and productivity and on the other hand is negatively associated with labour costs. Consequently, the greater potential of information sharing is not always reached, on the other hand, when referring to the difficulties in managing knowledge in organisations, “changing people’s behaviour’ is almost to be the number one difficulty cited in most literatures (Ruggles, 1998). In addition, the biggest impediments of the difficulties of information sharing are mostly citing, again ‘people issues’ and particularly culture (Ruggles, 1998). Accordingly, Alavi and Leidner (1999) argue that organisations will often face with difficulties in integrating knowledge-based systems into their organisations, when their organisational culture does not value and support information sharing. These arguments are proven based from established empirical findings. In the prior studies, Orlikowski (1992) describes the tendency of

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