THE INCOMPLETE, OUTDATED, INCORRECT, AND UNKNOWN: MITIGATING THREATS OF KNOWLEDGE ERRORS IN HIGH-PERFORMANCE PRIMARY CARE

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Professional service work is knowledge intensive and client dependent for the quantity and quality of available information. Knowledge errors occur when a professional service worker does not know certain facts about a client or lacks an adequate cognitive representation of a client’s profile. Using the case of “patient-centered medical homes” (PCMHs)—high-performance primary care clinics where workers are constantly acquir-ing information about patients to ensure their health and safety—I explore how PCMH workers handle knowledge errors at work. Through qualitative analysis, I find that PCMH workers encounter the threat of knowledge error from information that is incom-plete, outdated, incorrect, or unknown. To address these threats, they acquire information via four modes—gathering, verifying, expanding, and sensitizing—that generate two different forms of knowledge for the organization: (1) “maximized knowledge,” whose use is intentional to achieve organizational aims (e.g., to perform diagnoses); (2) “elaborated knowledge,” which represents new understanding, but whose use is com-paratively less scripted (e.g., a patient’s living situation). These discoveries suggest how different modes of information acquisition afford distinct opportunities for error prevention at the knowledge level, and that greater precision is needed when theorizing the ways in which organizational actors acquire information.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)581-602
JournalAcademy of Management Discoveries
Volume7
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 2021

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