Review Comment:
Overall evaluation
Select your choice from the options below and write its number below.
== 3 strong accept
== 2 accept
== 1 weak accept
== 0 borderline paper
== -1 weak reject
== -2 reject
== -3 strong reject
1
Reviewer's confidence
Select your choice from the options below and write its number below.
== 5 (expert)
== 4 (high)
== 3 (medium)
== 2 (low)
== 1 (none)
4
Interest to the Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management Community
Select your choice from the options below and write its number below.
== 5 excellent
== 4 good
== 3 fair
== 2 poor
== 1 very poor
4
Novelty
Select your choice from the options below and write its number below.
== 5 excellent
== 4 good
== 3 fair
== 2 poor
== 1 very poor
3
Technical quality
Select your choice from the options below and write its number below.
== 5 excellent
== 4 good
== 3 fair
== 2 poor
== 1 very poor
3
Evaluation
Select your choice from the options below and write its number below.
== 5 excellent
== 4 good
== 3 fair
== 2 poor
== 1 not present
1
Clarity and presentation
Select your choice from the options below and write its number below.
== 5 excellent
== 4 good
== 3 fair
== 2 poor
== 1 very poor
3
Review
The article, entitled `Knowledge Management Processes to Support Evidence Based Practice in Healthcare – a Swedish Case Study,' presents a study on knowledge management in the context of healthcare. The authors report on preliminary work, paving the way towards a knowledge management (KM) project that aims at providing a single access point to a wide variety of practitioners. The article contains a relevant contribution to the area of KM for healthcare, providing new qualitative evidence on medical practices collected through 62 semi-structured interviews with stakeholders, resulting in a number of observations relevant to any IS developer operating in the medical sector.
The main limitation of the article is in its presentation, which hinders its contribution. The discussion feels at times rather unfocused, and can benefit from streamlining and re-structuring. For this reason, I recommend that the authors solve the following issues in the revised version of the article prior publication:
- Project stakeholders: The authors indicate that their "knowledge portal" targets all healthcare professionals except physicians. Why is that the case? More explicit definition of user groups and stakeholders (e.g. managers, nurses, nurse assistants, etc) would help clarify the discussion. The power relations between these groups should be discussed more explicitly.
- Medical domain: For the KM reader unaccustomed to the healthcare domain in the Swedish context, it would be beneficial to provide brief definitions of terms such as "primary, secondary and municipality care."
- Abstract: The abstract feels too generic, and should reflect the content of the paper more closely. In particular, it should mention that the interviews constitute the core contribution of the paper.
- Theoretical background: This section is very generic. The knowledge lifecycle is a general framework for organizations, but how does it relate specifically to the healthcare domain? How does healthcare differ to any other complex domain of practice? This section should be shortened and the disciplinary areas of interests should be identified more clearly.
- Figure 1: The role of measurement is left explained in the part of the text. Please explain what you mean by "measurement" here.
- Research approach: This initial outline should be moved to the introduction, and the abstract and the introduction should refer to the research approach explicitly. The fact that the authors performed a literature review is obvious from Section 2.
- Methodology and data analysis. "Open/Axial coding": the authors should explain more in detail how they applied Grounded Theory in their interviews, clarifying how the findings were extracted from the interviews. What issues were encountered in the process?
- Findings: This section is the most problematic, as it presents long, loosely connected paragraphs. The authors should re-organize this section into more subsections, bringing the reader's attention to core findings. A table could be used to summarize the findings, grouping them by user group (managers, nurses, nurse assistants, etc.) and thematic area (creation, storage, sharing, etc.), allowing the reader to have an overview of the different groups' needs and perspectives. The same issue applies to section "Discussion," which does not appear sufficiently separate from section "findings". The two sections could be merged and split into a number of subsections to increase the general clarity of the paper.
- The role of patients: in the interviews, how did the different stakeholders view KM w.r.t. patients? As the patients are a crucial element in the knowledge architecture, it seems necessary to clarify this point. Do stakeholders have different information needs regarding general scientific literature and regarding their patients? Is it reasonable to host all this information in the same system?
- KM costs: The authors argue that explicit KM processes would benefit the healthcare delivery and the practice of evidence-based medicine. Although this is indeed a reasonable claim, KM has costs which should not be ignored or minimized. The authors point out that time is considered an issue, as documenting activities is time-consuming. Did any participants express concerns on the costs of embedding such KM procedures in their daily schedule? This issue deserves expansion.
Minor issues and typos:
- (11, 12, 13, 14) -> [11, ...]
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