For healthcare organizations patient welfare is of course the number one priority, but in order to provide this the organizations need tools that empower their workforce to communicate, collaborate, and share knowledge widely.

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted all of us and will continue to do so for a long period of time. For people working in healthcare it’s been seriously tough and exhausting. Effective communication with staff is important in normal times, but in the past year it’s been vital

Below we outline 5 ways a modern, well maintained and secure Intranet can assist a healthcare workforce

Opportunities to provide feedback 

It’s essential to allow your healthcare staff to have a voice, listen to their feedback, and make appropriate changes. Individuals and teams should have an opportunity to express concerns, needs, and wants. If you want to improve communication, you must be willing to listen.

• Consider adding a suggestion box to your homepage so users can share new ideas as they come to mind.
• Use online forms on your intranet to gather employee insights. Give every user the opportunity to tell you what they feel is missing or needs to change. 
• Generate a quick poll for instant feedback 
• Create channels to provide a digital collaboration space to make sharing ideas easy 
• Create private communities of practice where healthcare professionals can securely share best practices, insights, and outcomes.

Effective communication

Effective communication in healthcare environments is crucial. Healthcare organizations need to share the latest news, updates, research and developments with co-workers - the wellbeing of patients depends on this clear and accurate exchange of information. Put communication tools front and center on your intranet and deliver a message that sticks.

• Create news categories to broadcast high level corporate directives, but also for departmental and location specific news
• Move communication activities away from email, and into a central platform
• Use a mobile app to ensure everyone can access your intranet from their device of choice, and introduce push notifications, so that your frontline teams won't miss out on vital updates. 
• Use corporate social networking features for one-to-one and group communication opening up extra opportunities for collaborating with your healthcare teams.

Find colleagues with particular expertise and skill

Find the specialists, fast - make it quick and easy for doctors, nurses, clinicians and administrators to find information and connect to their colleagues with a searchable knowledge base and people directory.

• Build rich people profiles where staff can list their expertise and specialties 
• Find people by name, location, skills or experience

Provide every member of staff with access to the right policies and processes

To ensure healthcare workers understand how they can mitigate risk and meet compliance requirements it’s critical to have a tool where organizations can publish, manage and disseminate policies, procedures, and documentation. One of the key use cases for an intranet is providing a centrally- controlled library for important official documents, which all employees can easily access. As such the management teams can feel comfortable knowing that staff are accessing the single version of the truth

• Push important updates to your workers to maximize compliance rates.
• Keep track of changes with version control
• Share files with colleagues using #hashtags
• Find files fast using search with intuitive categorization and metadata
• Get your employee to confirm that they have read that important policy using required read functionality

Create extranet access 

Healthcare organizations regularly work closely with numerous external parties, research institutes, government departments, suppliers and volunteers. It’s more than likely that healthcare organizations will need to share different information with these external groups. An extranet can provide secure access to your whole intranet or a restricted set of content

• Forge and develop connections with your external parties
• Collaborate securely on projects 
• Reduce email going outside of the organization 

Healthcare organizations use GreenOrbit to communicate, manage documents and streamline processes from a central platform. GreenOrbit makes information easily accessible for healthcare workers, so they can provide exceptional care to patients. 

Want to know more about how GreenOrbit can support your healthcare organization? Contact the team for a personalized demo.

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