Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

In a knowledge-based economy, knowledge exchange is essential for organizational competiveness; improved performance; day to day activities and processes; and even organizational survival. Advances in information technology have caused this transformation to occur and remains the driving force behind the growing importance of knowledge management. Organizational Learning (OL), defined as the creation, retention, and transfer of knowledge at the organizational level, has been described as a process that is critical for proper organizational functioning. OL has also been linked to significant improvements in organizational performance and effectiveness. No research to date has been completed on how the integration of a new Clinical Information System (CIS) can potentially affect OL. The main objective is to investigate how the adoption of the new technology by the family medicine stakeholders influences OL. Particular attention will be paid to understand and explain the processes involved in the new technology adoption. This will be a case study design using a process approach. We estimate 14-15 family medicine stakeholders will be interviewed at different moments in time over a 3 year period (total number of interviews = 42-45), along with 3-4 group interviews of 6-8 participants each. The stakeholders will consist of clinicians and managers. This will take place within a Department of Family Medicine within a university hospital in Montreal, Quebec. Data collection will consist of interviews, observations, documentary sources, and various statistics that will be taken from the system (i.e. reports). We believe the results will help us understand and explain what OL processes are present during a CIS adoption and, in turn, how the adoption impacts these processes. Conclusion: We believe that this study will bring to light how stakeholders integrate the new CIS into their clinical and OL processes. Above all, we hope to highlight the utmost importance of OL in health.