Various reasons are considered for conducting a literature review, including eliciting information for creating and developing policies, in addition to evidence-based care [32]. Moreover, conducting literature reviews familiarize the researcher with his research topic; therefore, high-quality research is a reflection of the used sources [33]. As different type of research reviews exists and systematic review is one of it, [32], p. 39, states: “In contrast to the traditional or narrative review, systematic reviews use a more rigorous and well-defined approach to reviewing the literature in a specific subject area. Systematic reviews are used to answer well-focused questions about clinical practice”. Alternatively, “A review of a formulated question that uses systematic and explicit methods to identify, select, and critically appraise relevant research, and to collect and analyze data from the studies that are included in the review. Statistical methods (meta-analysis) may or may not be used to analyze and summarise the results of the included studies” [34].
This study aims to provide a systematic review of the previous studies’ methods for knowledge management in healthcare and to answer the research above questions.
Consequently, we followed the guidelines of conducting systematic literature review developed by Ref. [35] and other systematic reviews [36–39]. In that, we identified the inclusion and exclusion criteria, sources of collected data, search strategy, quality assessment of the collected data, data coding, and analysis.
3.1 Search Criteria
The study accomplished by relating an inclusion-exclusion criterion on collected data to determine what paper should be included, as shown in Table2.
The inclusion criteria cover papers of a period of 10 years from 2009 to 2019, written in the English language, and must focus on knowledge management and healthcare. On the other hand, the exclusions ruled out papers for more than ten years, other languages than English also papers not focused on knowledge management and healthcare.
Table 2 Inclusion and
exclusion criteria Criteria Inclusion Criteria exclusion Ten years (2009–2019) more than ten years (2008
and less) English language Other languages Must include knowledge
management
Not including knowledge management
Must include healthcare Not including healthcare
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3.2 Search Strategy
The conducting mapping study was based on online databases of papers such as;
BMJ, DIT, ScienceDirect, Emerald, IEEE, IGI, BioMed Central, Springer, MDPI, ECRI, Informs, Wiley Periodicals, Aspen, and Taylor & Francis. The mentioned databases covered specific conference proceedings and journals for the topic of our interest, Knowledge Management in healthcare. In addition to the selected online databases, the search strategy followed terms included the queries separated with a combination of the Boolean operator “AND”, “OR”: ((“Knowledge Management”
OR “KM”) AND (“in healthcare” OR “health”)) as showed in Table 3. Selecting related keywords for this study is a crucial step because it determines the retrieval of appropriate papers from databases [40].
Using the above search strategies, (74) relevant papers were found in total. As per Table4, (N=2) from BMJ, (N=5) from DIT, (N=15) from ScienceDirect,
Table 3 Searching queries
# Search query
1 “Knowledge Management” and “in healthcare”
2 “KM” and “in healthcare”
3 “Knowledge Management” and “health”
4 “KM” and “health”
Table 4 Total number of
papers found in a database # Database Name Total number of papers found (N)
1 BMJ 2
2 DIT 5
3 ScienceDirect 15
4 Emerald 15
5 IEEE 5
6 IGI 2
7 BioMed Central 2
8 Springer 6
9 MDPI 2
10 ECRI 1
11 Informs 3
12 Wiley Periodicals 2
13 Aspen 5
14 Taylor & Francis 9 Total 74
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(N=15) from Emerald, (N=5) from IEEE, (N=2) from IGI, (N=2) from BioMed Central, (N=6) from Springer, (N=2) from MDPI, (N=1) from ECRI, (N=3) from Informs, (N=2) from Wiley Periodicals, (N=5) from Aspen, and (N=9) from Taylor & Francis.
3.3 Processing and Selecting
A total of 74 articles included these keywords. Among these, it was found that 3 articles were repeated, and so they were eliminated. A total of 71 papers were now remaining for the review. The way these articles are distributed with respect to the databases they are a part of is shown in Fig.1. As a second step, the title and abstract were screened based on the previously defined criteria, which made the total number of papers (N=25). By checking the eligibility of papers after entire text reading against the search queries, the papers left for this study are (N=10).
3.4 Quality Assessment
Quality assessment is an essential factor that must be examined along with the inclusion-exclusion criterion [41–43]. A checklist with nine criteria (Table5) for a quality assortment was identified to evaluate the 10 studies and to prepare it for further analysis. This checklist was adapted from those proposed by [35]. The check- list was not planned to be a form of criticism of any researchers’ work [35]. Each question in the checklist was scored according to the three-point scale. An answer of
“Yes” being worth 1 point, an answer of “No” being worth 0 point, and an answer of
“Partially” being worth 0.5 point. Therefore, each study could score between 0 and 9, with the higher the total score a study attains, the higher the degree to which this study addresses the research questions.
As a result, Table6presents the quality assessment results of all 10 studies. As all of the studies passed the quality assessment, hence, it is eligible for further analysis.
3.5 Data Coding and Analysis
Several interrelated features to the research methodology quality were tilted including (a) author, (b) year of publication, (c) research aim, (d) type KM processes, (e) research method, (f) research findings, (g) country of which the study was about, (h) research participants and (i) database (Table8). Some of the studies didn’t clarify impact of KM process on healthcare systems, therefore it got excluded from the synthesis.
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Fig. 1 Literature search flowchart
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Table 5 Quality assessment checklist
# Questions
1 Is the research aim specified clearly?
2 Did the study achieve its aim?
3 Are the variables considered by the study clearly indicated?
4 Is the context/discipline of the study clearly defined?
5 Are the method of collecting data sufficiently detailed?
6 Is the study describing the measure’s reliability/validity?
7 Are the statistical techniques used to analyze the data sufficiently described?
8 Do the findings add to the literature?
9 Does the study add to your knowledge or understanding?