Summary: A healthcare intranet can benefit your organization in many ways, from improving patient care to centralizing resources. Discover our top 4 ways you can benefit from a healthcare intranet.
Hospitals, clinics, end-of-life care facilities, and other companies within the healthcare industry can benefit greatly by implementing an intranet within their organization. A well-designed healthcare intranet can provide employees with access to the tools they need to immediately improve communication, enhance staff education and training and most importantly, improve patient care.
The 4 primary benefits to implementing a Healthcare Intranet are:
- Improving Staff Communication
- Improving Patient Care
- Providing a Central Location for Resources
- Providing Organized Departmental Sites
1. Improving Staff Communication
Many intranet solutions will come equipped with a Staff Directory, which displays all admitting staff, doctors, nurses, orderlies and administrative staff all in a convenient, central location online. This increases the ease with which staff can look up other employees and even get in touch with them. They can use their mini card by phone, email, or writing on their intranet wall. Many intranets will also come with a convenient tagging feature, to quickly look up staff members tagged with specific features or specialties.
2. Improving Patient Care
Patient care is a priority for all healthcare providers and therefore finding ways to improve patient experience is imperative for any healthcare organization. An intranet can provide a variety of applications and resources to improve patient care, including:
Patient Care Feedback
A built-in open application which allows staff to log in and track, collaborate and devise strategies to improve patient care. Adding an approval workflow ensures that all posted content first goes through an intranet admin prior to being posted to the site. Staff can then rate and comment on previously posted ideas, or add in ideas of their own.
Staff Training
An Online Training Calendar application on your Healthcare Intranet allows staff to review available training courses in a simple calendar format and sign up for the ones they find interesting or beneficial. Simple attendance tracking ensures automatic registration emails are automatically sent out to the Course Manager and the submitting student and that courses display as full once the maximum number of students have registered for a course.
Online Surveys & Tests
Pre-built employee tests and surveys improve patient care by ensuring all staff are aware of current policies and procedures. Through automated scoring, upon submission the test immediately displays which answers the staff member has gotten incorrect and displays the correct answers right on the page. If necessary, the staff member can then choose to take the test again, this time given different questions due to randomized question banks, to attempt a better score. All test submissions are then automatically sent to their supervisor for review.
Healthcare Fundraising Site
Raising support and awareness for healthcare and community causes can be essential to your mission in bringing about quality patient care and also improve intranet adoption and employee engagement within your healthcare organization. Pre-built fundraising site templates help to promote fundraising activities and includes applications and resources to increase fundraising efforts such as registration forms and an event calendar.
3. Providing a central location for resources on your healthcare intranet
A Healthcare Intranet provides a central location which makes available all necessary documents and forms, expedites the patient care process and makes for a smoother patient experience. Digital document storage and information retrieval means staff no longer need to manually go through paper file cabinets to find the resources they need – they simply search, pull-up and print their required form.
A central resource database also assists with easing the internal administration process, by moving changes to hospital visiting hours, cafeteria meal order forms and HR material such as self-assessment surveys and time-sheets all onto the intranet. Adding automatic workflow also allows submitted forms to be sent immediately to the appropriate HR staff member for processing, and the submitting staff member receives a copy of their own submission via email so they know it went through.
4. Providing organized departmental sites
Organizing your Healthcare Intranet into your various departments increases the ease with which staff can find the information they need. Each site has their own What’s New Feed on their Department Site, and information within this section can be pushed to the main home page to share events and activities going on within your department to the rest of the healthcare organization. Hospitals find it beneficial to separate their Department Sites into various hospital wards, such as neurology, maternity, palliative care, pediatrics and more. Each site has its own menu navigation, a home page, as well as pages and applications designed to specifically meet the needs of that department or ward.
Healthcare intranets give you a competitive advantage
Improving staff communication and patient care and providing a central location for resources as well as organized departmental sites, are just a few of the reasons intranets are an invaluable resource for any healthcare organization.
If your healthcare organization is ready to try out an intranet, book your free demo with IC today.
Editors Note: This post was originally posted on January 24th, 2014 and has been edited for updates and accuracy.
