Healthcare Industry Intranets: 5 Top Complaints, Symptoms, and Their Fixes

Investing in digital innovation and transformation is one of the top six issues in the healthcare industry, according to Deloitte's 2019 Global health care outlook report.

On one side we have new healthtech companies, and in particular innovative healthcare AI startups, receiving huge amounts of investment. And on the other, we see organizations already in the industry, with current systems lagging far behind these tech-first businesses.

Do you need to overhaul your systems to ensure longevity in your slice of the industry?

Take a look through our common healthcare IT complaints and symptoms and see if they match yours - then see the fixes you need to make your systems healthy again.

Complaint #1: Highly segmented departments

Symptoms

• Lack of awareness into other departments’ function and initiatives
• Blind information handovers
• Lost cross-department communications

Fix: Holistic Intranet for cross-department visibility

Without being on the ground, the only way to gain visibility into another department’s function, workflows, and systems is by knowledge sharing. In the past, this may be accomplished via people in different departments chatting over the phone about the goings-on in their own departments, or in-person at lunchtime. This ad-hoc knowledge sharing lacks maturity and traceability.

Instead, departments must be tasked with taking responsibility for the promotion of news, workflows, and staffing with the wider organization. The easiest way to achieve this is via a modern workplace intranet.

With a modern workplace intranet, departments may be separated into their own sections and available to view from the wider organization. Department spaces can include news (which can be promoted to the wider workplace news if it’s considered important), important documents and processes, staff directory, and more.

Complaint #2: Lengthy manual processes

Symptoms

• Lengthy manual processes to locate documents, retrieve information, and send to other sources
• File systems where you need to know exactly where something is to find it
• Incorrect permissions on documents
• Better digital processes at home than at work
• A feeling of wasted time

Fix: Modern document management

Traditional file systems, such as what you would view in File Explorer, are only as good as the written processes that they are bound by.

In modern systems, letting document management be governed and implemented on a case-by-case basis by written rules is out. Instead, we must have document management processes and permissions be an easy task, governed by already machine-codified rules.

Modern document management is designed to make it easy to create files and folders, along with their permissions. Setting up these systems to automate as much as possible in the beginning is imperative. Modern document management comes with fast, intuitive search functionality, too.

Complaint #3: Outdated within-department communications practices

Symptoms

• Using the telephone as a main means of communication
• Using email as a secondary means of communication
• Lengthy paper trails to track communications
• Focus on one-to-one communications

|Fix: Team workspaces

Email and the telephone are the ideal means of communication within healthcare - if you have somehow managed to time travel back to the 1980s. We now have much more modern communication channels available to us; instant communication that’s trackable, traceable, and can be conveyed to one person or many, with different media easily shared and available for instant collaboration.

We are talking here about team workspaces.

Team workspaces are online spaces in which we can instantly write to colleagues, share and work on files, tag in new people or themes as necessary, and easily search and trace conversations, because historical information is always available at our fingertips.

Complaint #4: Out of pace with other industries

Symptoms

• Brain drain
• Shock/envy over friends’ and families' work systems
• Technology frustration

Fix: Surveying the landscape to see what other industries are doing

Want to know how to stop the exodus of new staff from your organization? While long term team members might be perfectly comfortable using outdated systems (as they are used to them), you’re likely to find new hires or tech-savvy employees heading off for greener pastures. And while this isn’t necessarily heading off to one of your competitors - rather a change in the industry - it still represents a loss of talent and waste of resources spent on them.

Rather than looking at what your competition is doing, look to other industries to see where the bar has been set.

For instance, you can take a look at our use cases in retail with Kmart and emergency services with South Australia’s Country Fire Service. Pick out the things you 1) need and 2) like about other industries’ intranet and technology solutions to start coming up with ideas about how your new internal solution will come together.

Having a modern technology infrastructure is essential to attract and retain talented employees.

Complaint #5: Fear of change

Symptoms

• Chimes of “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”
• Concern about HIPAA and new systems
• Fear of investing in complex systems that might break or not work as expected

Fix: Investor and user buy-in

Fear of change exists on both sides of the spectrum here: from management who are concerned about the cost and complexity of new systems, and from users who are nervous they won’t be able to navigate new technology easily.

However fear is all this is.

It is because neither of these parties (that are invested in technology infrastructure) have been shown that it can be as pain-free as possible. With CentricMinds, you can convince management of the benefits of buying into an off-the-shelf solution that already works, tailored to your organizational needs without breaking the bank. By creating a prototype system with our free trial, you can show users how easy the solution is to use and navigate.