Why did Beijing Aikang Group spend more than 180 days to consolidate 10,000 knowledge documents?

Recently, by Beijing Aikang GroupKnowledge ManagementThe "Knowledge Management Celebrity Show" expert interview column created by the Knowledge Management Committee invited Dr. Wang Dong, the chairman of the group, to share his valuable wisdom and experience. The following is the interview content:

With the joint efforts of all Aikang family members, the knowledge base has accumulated nearly 10,000 knowledge documents in just half a year, and the concept and culture of knowledge sharing have gained more and more recognition and participation from family members. The knowledge base project was launched in August 2017 at your suggestion. Can you talk about the original intention of starting the knowledge management project?

Dr. Wang Dong: Let me answer this question with a classic case. In the early 1990s, new management ideas such as knowledge management and process management emerged in China. Why did companies like Huawei, Lenovo, Haier, and PwC start working on knowledge management and process management at the beginning of this trend? Because these are new concepts and new ideas. When there are new methods, they are brave enough to try and make mistakes on a small scale. Even if they fail, the impact on the company is not significant; but once they succeed, the value enhancement is enormous.

Conversely, why have large-scale activities conducted by Huangshi Aikang Hospital ten years ago still not progressed, and in some areas may even be worse than before? Why do we still repeat the mistakes made in the past? Why do we always start from scratch? Why have the very good things done in the past not been passed down? Because newcomers do not stand on a higher starting point, we have not summarized experiences and lessons, nor shared excellent cases. Even if newcomers are highly skilled, they are still newcomers within our company, and they do not stand on the shoulders of predecessors and giants, so it is inevitable to repeat the same mistakes.

Therefore, we hope to continuously summarize and share everyone's knowledge wealth through the construction of the knowledge base, to pass on our valuable knowledge and wisdom at Aikang, and for everyone to continuously improve through PDCA.

Based on the experience cases you mentioned, we are deeply inspired. So we would like to ask, do you think knowledge management can become one of the core competencies of the group in the future? Why?

　　Dr. Wang Dong:First of all, I believe that we should continue to promote knowledge management. After your efforts, knowledge management will definitely become one of the core competencies of the group in the future. From the perspective of enterprise operation, knowledge management is more like the service of our hospital. We need a brand, and the brand needs to continuously optimize our services through new methods, which can also make knowledge management more effective and interesting.

　　For example:I have a classmate in a certain group, and their group requires departing employees to upload the phased results or work experiences and summaries generated during their work to the knowledge base before leaving. This way, when the successor arrives, they can quickly get into work based on the previous work results or lessons learned in a short time. Although this work style may seem a bit overbearing, it allows our knowledge to be more flexible, effective, and rapidly disseminated and applied within the organization.

If knowledge management is to become the core competitiveness of the enterprise, the most important point is to pay more attention to the needs of employees and the collaboration between employees and the enterprise. Our managers, partners, medical experts, and patients are all part of knowledge management.

As practitioners of knowledge management, you must know that knowledge cannot be just personal; its value must be reflected in sharing, and it must continuously circulate within the organization, providing us with nourishment, allowing our enterprise to become healthier and stronger. This is also what I hope for in knowledge management, and it is one of the conditions for our knowledge management to become a core competitiveness.

The chairman just mentioned a certain group's case, which is very instructive. Can you share your own experience case during your 25 years of managing Aikang Group?

　　Dr. Wang Dong:In fact, when it comes to experiences and lessons, I feel that there are many experience cases I can share with you. These experience cases can be learned repeatedly, and if we can pass down 20%-30%, that would be great, because experience is accumulated over time, and it cannot be learned from books.

　　For example:When I was studying at a certain hospital, I happened to encounter a patient who accidentally fell from the second floor. At that time, a young doctor ran over, did a rough check, and said, "It's not a big problem, go back to the ward and rest." Later, I learned that this doctor was given a serious reprimand and was held accountable for serious negligence. Upon further investigation, it was found that the doctor failed to pay attention to details, leading to excessive bleeding from a ruptured spleen, which aggravated the patient's condition and resulted in death. The doctor's remark of "It's not a big problem" led to a responsibility that could have been avoided.

From this experience, we can see that how a doctor speaks is also a skill. Just as Dean Wang Shui mentioned in his lecture at Aikang University, "Details determine success or failure." Sometimes the knowledge taught in books is very important, but it is only when it can be applied in practice that a person's true level can be reflected.

The case mentioned by the chairman allows us and everyone in the group to learn that being a doctor is not difficult, but being an excellent physician is very challenging. Being a doctor is not just about applying medical knowledge and skills; there is much knowledge that can only be learned in daily life. So, combining medicine and knowledge management, can the chairman tell us about the value of knowledge management in the medical industry?

　　Dr. Wang Dong:Speaking of value, I heard a lot about the value of knowledge management in the early stages of establishing it, and I have also learned some key points, which I will share with you now. Aikang's knowledge management should use Aikang as a platform, utilizing medical management and information technology to fully integrate people and knowledge, to accumulate organizational memory, enhance employee capabilities, and improve work performance. This is also our "nuclear weapon" that distinguishes Aikang from other medical institutions and builds a century-old foundation.

Currently, our group has more than 20 medical institutions. How can we achieve mutual sharing and communication of knowledge? Our knowledge base plays a significant role in this. Through the Aikang knowledge base, medical knowledge and experience cases can break through geographical and temporal limitations, allowing personal knowledge to continuously transform into organizational knowledge, enabling learning and exchanging professional knowledge and case records anytime and anywhere on the platform, and achieving rapid dissemination and promotion of new knowledge, new methods, new technologies, and new management concepts.

Hearing the values mentioned by the chairman, we feel that achieving these goals, knowledge management can really help our enterprise rise to a new level. We also firmly believe that our knowledge management team can achieve this, but as members of the knowledge management project team, we would like to know what your expectations or goals for our future Aikang knowledge management are?

　　Dr. Wang Dong:Speaking of expectations or goals, I think I can summarize my meaning in one sentence: "Knowledge management can enable enterprises to learn quickly and transform into productivity and competitiveness." This can be divided into two steps:

The first step is to enrich the knowledge base. We first need to fill the knowledge base, create an atmosphere, and turn it into something visible. Why do people have a high recognition of Baidu? When encountering problems, they all suggest going to Baidu Wenku for answers. Because the document volume in Baidu Wenku is very large. Although this is an internal knowledge base for enterprises, I know that doing this work still has some difficulties.

For example: it is still quite difficult to collect and share knowledge that is scattered across employees' personal computers. In addition, among the four hospitals under the group, doctors and departments have concerns about whether knowledge can be shared. I also found that a lot of important knowledge is held by key business personnel, such as department heads, and these people are the busiest in the hospital, having no time to write knowledge documents. Moreover, in their minds, many documents, once established, are disconnected from the business.

Therefore, I also know that despite a series of knowledge management concept promotions and incentive measures, you ultimately found that the knowledge base accumulated mostly consists of documents from functional departments, with very few truly core high-value documents related to medical technology. This is actually a common issue faced by many enterprises in the early stages of knowledge management—"growing pains."

The second step is that knowledge management must be closely integrated with our business, aiming for a "dual integration of processes and knowledge." As we often say in management: "Process pipeline, knowledge flowing water," we need to integrate knowledge with every aspect of the process. Many knowledge management teams in enterprises feel a lack of achievement because they treat knowledge management as something separate from the business.

Therefore, when we do knowledge management ourselves, we must avoid such problems by constructing specific knowledge journey maps and knowledge maps along the business process, making the generation and reuse of knowledge a natural part of business activities.

Additionally, when emphasizing processes and knowledge, which is the core of your work in 2019, the essence is a thought of management standardization, which is to continuously consolidate knowledge in the process and form standards, creating knowledge services and a human-centered knowledge service system. At the same time, it is also necessary to utilize various new technologies to better meet everyone's needs, "to let the right people find the right knowledge in the right scenarios."

　　This article is authorized to be reproduced from the WeChat public account "Beijing Aikang Group" (ID: aikang120), with slight modifications.

Dr. Wang Dong, Chairman of Beijing Aikang Group, pointed out the two important steps for transforming knowledge management into productivity and competitiveness: enriching the knowledge base; integrating with business, achieving "dual integration of processes and knowledge." Both steps rely on the cultivation of knowledge management talents; only with proper talent cultivation can the enterprise's knowledge management reach a new level.

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