Passageways Blog : Transforming Enterprise and Industry Knowledge into New Success

The increasing compartmentalization of employees based on department, role, specialty, locations, etc. has led to an erosion of their understanding of the hospital's organizational identity. There is at times a gap between the hospitals commucations of needs and requirements and employees ability to get access to this information. This leads to a gap in understanding the organization identity in the minds of their most valuable resources and a lack of belonging to the organization as a whole. This displacement creates a change in the organization transforming career passion to just a job.

Frequent and sincere efforts are made to ensure employee understanding of a hospital's goals and actions.  These can take the form of all employee mails, intranets, seminars, updates on website, meetings with senior staff, media reports, etc., each with varying degree of success. E-mail remains the most often used and readily accessible to most employees and is great for quick updates.  The biggest problem with e-mail is that it is lacking in creating continuity for communicating the path to the goals. E-mail has also burgeoned over the past few years both in terms of use and space requirements leaving everyone a little indifferent to them. Many hospitals developed Intranets as a way to alleviate some of that apathy but were hampered in the past by ease of use, hours of IT time to update information, lack of compelling business applications to help employee do their jobs, and a structure that required you to know the organization in and out before you could find information. In the age of Google, social media, and collaboration a lot of them are outdated legacy systems that get perfunctory lip service. Plus they are expensive to maintain.

With web 2.0 and intranets, powered by portal technology, past problems are something that can be remedied by hospitals. Intranet Portals are now less IT team dependant and more built around knowledge experts and content managers who have the ability to update the hospital's intranet. This frees valuable resources to focus on reaching the organization's goal and avoids duplication of efforts. The ease of updating and maintaining of the intranet portal makes it a much more user-friendly tool for communication and collaboration. The additional options in terms of live information and dashboards helps generate the rich user interface and up to date content that most of us are used to nowadays from current computer technology.  Additionally the user interface of the portal can become a valuable tool in communicating your hospital's identity to the employees. It can become the source of information for your hospital with things like employee directory, information about locations, services offered, physicians specialty and accreditation, calendars, and employee benefits, just to name a few. That becomes a draw for people to look at the information there. But is that enough?

There has to be a better pull to utilize this tool. The start would be to expand your portal to include links to your frequently used business applications. Tools like Helpdesks, e-forms, employee surveys, discussion boards, assigned tasks, vendor management, and dashboards are just a few examples of how the portal can be used by hospitals to maximize portal use. Another great way to use the portal would be for process streamlining, employee collaboration, and crowd sourcing. With open source and developer's kit becoming the industry norm, business streamlining solutions are no longer limited to canned versions provided by vendors and are extendable for your organizations needs.

Portal technology has enhanced the intranet from becoming a static tool with a document repository to a business tool for employee collaboration and process streamlining. The employee portal now provides you a space for communication across the employee base with ease and a greater reach than e-mail. The employee collaboration and business productivity tools provide the portal more cookies in the jar to get all your employees to use the tool and for the hospital to stay positive in your return of investment in the technology.

Like every other business, hospitals need to make money. Yet most of them have been the slowest to realize that they are not an amalgamation of small sections, but enterprises that need to utilize their size better and get more efficient to become more successful. No other industry could survive with the kind of margins that hospitals make, but they can't afford to charge patients more. The only option:  have less cost.

Hospital woes are low margins, increasing receivables, reduced cash balance, and uncompensated care.  And since the start of the economic downturn these problems have become worse. The initial response to this has been downsizing in terms of staff, services, and stalling or even cancelling capital projects. Now that the new healthcare bill has passed, some relief should be provided to Hospitals (once it becomes active) on their uncompensated patient care. But it's too early to start counting that money. Hospitals need to shape up to keep the doors open until that flow starts. The goal is to get efficient to reach the stage where they start becoming more profitable.  It doesn't matter if you are for profit or not, the money shall just help you invest in better services for the community.

 Here are 5 thoughts on what Hospitals can do to get more efficient...

• 1. Focus on what you are good at - "Oft given and cheap advice, seldom taken to heart." Not every hospital needs to be a multi specialty location. Look at balance sheets to understand money makers and loss leaders. Other than convenience why would anyone come to your Hospital? A couple of important non-clinical focus areas have to be Patient Satisfaction and Staff Satisfaction. Do not just measure it, get active on it. Find the pain points and work towards changing those. If you are not sure then get help.

 

• 2. Get the experts - "A lot of hospitals have gone this route and ....... nothing changed." Honestly, industrial experts understand more about material and work flow. Get their help to design your patient flow. IT experts know more about how to get the best out of your information network, use their services. Get your people on board with these changes early and keep them engaged. Measure progress through the cycle of change and you might have to tweak the process if it is not working. Remember to do a sanity check to ensure that you are not slipping back to old habits.

 

• 3. Dashboards - "What gets measured gets done." This old saying is very misleading. What people believe in is what actually gets done. Choose your dashboards very carefully and make sure to the right stakeholders to buy in. Be sure that stakeholders understand their role in a process. Harvest information from your peers and network to see what is working for them and why. There is a cost associated with every action (time, manpower, IT etc.), be cognizant of that and focused on what the problems are.

 

• 4. Manage your dollar - "It is very easy to spend money but very difficult to make it." Think very carefully before investing your money. Ask your peers and others within the medical community. If you are not already a part of an association or community, join one and become an active contributor. Utilize the power of an interested and invested group of people to understand pro's, con's, and options.

 

• 5. Retention is the key - "The cost of losing an employee is about 38 percent of the departing employee's annual wage." Retain your staff. They are the ones who developed a rapport with the patients. Use your intranet portal to develop an organization identity. If you don't have and intranet portal, then get one. Use intranet portals and other communication tools to make their job simpler and reduce stress at work. Making information easier to access on your intranet portal empowers your employee and helps create standards at work. This helps making life simpler, therefore making you employees happier.

None of the above can be done without a strong and engaged management team. If you can't convince the board, a smaller group of people, then you can't convince the staff. Professional management and governance needs to become the norm rather than the exception. Improvement requires change at various levels, workflow is the easiest one. Pushing the belief that we can do better and getting out "I know best" rut is the tough one. Get people on board early and keep them engaged is key.

 

We know some of you are still trying to decide about PowWOW 2010...well here is a good list for staters! 

1. Hang out and meet Passageways Staff - Don't you want to learn why we are called Pathfinders? You need to come and shake hands with the people behind your portal. It's more fun to work with friends!

2. Learning about award winning projects and products- Did you know Passageways won 7 awards last year? And 4 different products won these awards...come join in the celebrations.

3. Be the first to get all major Passageways Announcements - Don't you what to learn how P4 fared last year? Want to know about Community Portals are we now working on?

4. Peer to Peer networking - Need to talk to peers who have the same goals and challenges? PowWow is the place to do it! You'll gain a few Facebook friends at this conference for sure!

5. Best Practices - You know some other organizations have some nuggets you can borrow and look smart back in the office, right? Or perhaps you come and share your own success stories!

6. Developer Track for Dev - want to learn more on how stuff comes together, meet the crew themselves. Object Oriented Programming is the name of the game! .

7. Indianapolis is more than just a race track! Check out downtown Indy and a enjoy America's newest airport! The conference is walking distance from a mall and several restaurants!

8. Get to broaden your horizons and be away from the office all at the same time! How does a casino night full of surprises followed by quality gaming time sound?

9. Just the Speaker line-up and some prominent attendees are reasons to come!

1. Mark Meyer, CEO Filene Research Institute

2. Randy Karnes, CEO of CU*Answers

3. Prof. Patrick Duparcq, Kellogg Management School

4. Doug True, CTO, Forum Credit Union

5. Bob Falk, CEO, Purdue EFCU

6. Ken Burnett, Director, Bank of American Fork

7. Thad Hutcheson, CIO, T Bank

8. Andrea Stritzke, Regulatory Counsel, Policyworks

9. Gordon Gregory, VP Technology, Mazuma Credit Union

10. Jackie Buchanan, CIO, Genisys Credit Union

11. Mike Atkins, CEO of OTS

10. "How to" Lounge - Hand's on learning -lounging is good, especially at this one. We don't teach you how to lounge around.We teach your how to get things done!

11. Meet the Developers- Don't you want to hang with the developer of our new Sales management Module and Vendor Management Module?

12. Certification Programs - Want some tangible credibility points? You're the portal expert. Earn something that proves it too...just 6 seats left!

 Here is the conference page and of course the Registration page

What did we miss?  share you thoughts if you have some more ideas..