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 In the age of Google, social media, and collaboration a lot of them are outdated legacy systems that get perfunctory lip service.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.