Information overload: implications for healthcare services

Abstract

Information overload is not a new phenomenon: the potential for it has existed ever since information became an important input to any human activity. For example, once the scientific disciplines began to clearly emerge in the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, it gradually became impossible for anyone to keep abreast of all of the work in what had been called ‘natural philosophy’. In some fields, the degree of specialization is so high that, even within the same discipline, people are unable to keep abreast of all subareas and, in fact, may be completely unable to understand some of them. This paper defines and analyses the phenomenon of information overload and seeks to present organizational therapies that address it.