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This paper describes factors influencing doctor‐managers' decision making in specialised health care, health centres and at different levels of management.

Data were collected as part of a survey on physicians graduating in 1977‐1991 as drawn from the register of the Finnish Medical Association. The study sample was formed by selecting all physicians born on odd days (n=4,144) from the baseline group (n=8,232). The category of doctor‐managers comprised physicians reporting as their main occupation: principal or assistant principal physician of hospital, medical director or principal physician of health centre, senior ward physician of hospital, and health centre physician in charge of a population area.

Independent of gender, all doctor‐managers responding to the survey reported that the most important base for decision making was personal professional experience. Position in organisation (first‐line manager, principal physician) had no impact on the base of decision making. Doctor‐managers in primary health care utilised knowledge on norms and knowledge available from their organisation in support of their decision making to a greater degree compared with doctor‐managers in specialised health care.

Evolution discourse from public administration is not yet receiving much response in Finnish doctor‐managers' activities, instead, they still act as clinicians.

Facing the growing challenges of the future, the paper shows that doctor‐managers should reconstruct their orientation and to act more like managers.

The purpose of the study is to develop understanding about the role of information and knowledge in healthcare processes and thereby create a basis for practices that would better support the actual service provision. This paper seeks to model and analyze the service processes of two case settings: laboratory and radiology units of a Finnish regional healthcare system.

The main actors, their knowledge needs, current knowledge practices and bottlenecks in knowledge flows were recognized. The paper combines conceptual analysis and empirical findings. The empirical data were collected in the autumn of 2010 and consist of 32 thematic interviews in two units of a healthcare organization in Finland. The themes of the interviews are related to current knowledge practices and processes.

The paper exemplifies an approach that provides a systematic basis for analyzing different aspects of knowledge management in healthcare processes. The approach provides valuable insights for analyzing knowledge‐based foundations of health services and it is expected that this analysis helps elaborate the practical knowledge processes of healthcare organizations.

The paper approaches health information management from the viewpoint of knowledge management discourse and highlights the importance of knowledge‐based value creation. Instead of mere information transfer or delivery the paper emphasizes the knowledge‐in‐use perspective. Despite the essential role of knowledge assets, the development efforts have mainly concentrated on solving local problems with context specific technical solutions.