Informing the Design of a Health Virtual Community of Practice: A Knowledge Translation Approach

Access to knowledge forms an integral part of the continuous learning processes of medical and other health professionals throughout their career. Modern technologies have become instrumental in extending learning processes to the online realm, particularly through the use of social media technologies. Health Practitioners’ (HPs) exploitation of online social media technologies for online learning and knowledge sharing purposes has evolved into Virtual Communities of Practice (VCoP). However, there is limited research on the types of knowledge being shared to fulfil the notion of ‘knowledge-into-action’ in the healthcare domain. In addition, little is known of the use of online social media technologies as a catalyst to achieve ‘knowledge-into-action’. This research in progress paper extends the conceptual model from our previous work and draws on current literature that identifies the types of knowledge being shared in a Health VCoP. We discuss some of our data using our conceptual lens as a preliminary analysis of our work. Expected outcomes are a new extended conceptual model that fulfils the notion of ‘knowledge-into-action’ that informs the design of an IT artefact based on types of knowledge being shared in a Health VCoP.