Recently our Intranet Engagement Consultant, Maz, worked alongside Northfield Hospital & Clinics to create and implement their new customized healthcare intranet. Along with our graphic designer, he worked closely with Northfield to design an intranet with a simple, easy-to-navigate user interface, which contains all the healthcare resources they need to accomplish their day-to-day tasks within the organization.
Working with so many different companies on a day-to-day basis, we see how important design and architectural structure are to the success of an intranet over time. Your organization is a living, breathing organic entity, and therefore your intranet should be flexible and accommodate organizational changes. Making sure that your intranet is keeping up with the needs of your business is essential in achieving healthcare intranet success.
I write today, in hopes that this article will help raise awareness about the health of your intranet. Let’s begin by placing our index and middle finger on the wrist of your intranet site and checking its pulse.
Your Annual Healthcare Intranet Check-Up
Haven’t had an intranet check-up in a while? Let’s start by going over the vitals:
Is your intranet engaging your employees?
Knowing how often various areas of your intranet are being visited will give you an indication of which areas are the most popular or useful to your organization. At Intranet Connections, we provide a stats module where you can see which areas of your site are being visited the most and have the ability to track site usage including page popularity, user logins, browsing behavior, and specific content tracking. Stats can be invaluable as an audit trail for monitoring edits and deletions.
Is your intranet providing real business value to your organization?
Ensure that your intranet is meeting the ROI checklist. Reduce time and paper costs with online forms, increase employee retention through training programs, reduce bottlenecks in communication through smart delegation and increase overall productivity.
Are there features or applications not being used?
Social tools such as content sharing, status updates, community sites, and topic discussions are a great way to improve intranet collaboration and increase overall intranet success. As our Product Manager Neil Chong-Kit outlined in his blog on better intranet management, intranets that see most employee engagement are designed “by everyone, for everyone”.
Maintaining Your Intranet Health
Similar to diet and exercise, there are actions you can take regularly to ensure that your intranet remains healthy:
1) Delegate Site, Application, and Folder Content Administration
Our software is simple to use and easy to manage (no IT experience required) which means you can delegate responsibility for community sites, applications within your sites, and even folder management to non-IT admins. Spreading responsibility means content stays fresh and up-to-date.
2) Improve Collaboration through Idea Share, Discussion Boards, and Blogs
Your employees are a great resource for ideas and information. Just ask Gold Coast Hospital Emergency Department who received a recommendation from the Intranet Innovation Awards for their unique training program implemented using their healthcare intranet. Rather than have IT create the training forms they opened them up to senior-level doctors who added images, videos, and case studies to their interactive intranet training test forms, increasing the overall success of their hospital training program.
3) Utilize Some or All of Your Social Tools
The intranet has a vast array of social tools available to your organization. While some companies hesitate to turn on social tools such as the employee wall, instant chat, and colleague following, there are a variety of social applications which can be used to greatly improve and maintain the health of your intranet. One of which is the comments and rating feature, which gauges the popularity of certain content on your intranet site. Using the popularity search feature employees can then search for content based on its popularity – content with higher popularity appears higher in the search results.
A Healthcare Intranet by Intranet Connections
Entering its fifteenth year as a leading intranet software provider, Intranet Connections operates at the center of 160 hospitals and health facilities, including 14 Mayo Clinic locations. If you are looking for a new healthcare intranet solution, request a quick 20-min product demo.
Image Source: Learningall.com
