Virtual communities of practice success in healthcare sector: A comparative review

Abstract

Many organizations including health care sector, have failed to attain the expected benefits from the knowledge management (KM) initiatives or projects. One of the KM initiatives in health care sector is virtual communities of practice (VCoPs), where practitioners conduct discussions and share experience online. Presently, there is no accepted or overall conceptual framework that addresses the important aspects of effective KM in a way to assist specifically the virtual communities in KM, reflecting the need to review the literature pertaining the VCoPs measurement in order to extract the main taxonomy from the literature. The review shows that research on VCoPs should take into account technical, social, semantic, human, and effectiveness dimensions in measuring the VCoPs success.