With the push towards accountable care organizations, we’re seeing a lot of merger and acquisition activity as well as partnerships. In addition to this activity, the Bain Report documented an increase of younger healthcare providers moving towards larger management-led organizations for stability, better pay and the opportunity to advance.

A Hospital Intranet can help improve communication to the expanding management and healthcare staff through executive blog posts, departmental or provider sub-sites, centralized Policy Management and employee onboarding applications.  It’s critical through uncertain times to keep your staff in the loop and connect physicians to the resources they need, giving them a sense of identity and belonging within the overall organization’s vision and mission.

Close to 20% of spending in the US is on healthcare, with the World Health Organization 2015 Report forecasting  it will only be increasing as the years go on.  This knowledge is simply staggering.  A lot of these increases are due to the lack of consistency in care, unnecessary readmission, poor staff coordination and difficulty in identifying problem areas within the hospital or healthcare organization.

To counteract the increase in costs, you can empower the physicians and staff to work in a systematized way, giving them standard treatment protocols online.  Protocols can be displayed in a variety of formats from documents and videos to photos. These online protocols come with the benefit of adding testing materials (online surveys and exams) to measure comprehension.  Getting a handle on cost-cutting initiatives can go both ways. A hospital intranet allows you to tap into your employees and get feedback using engaging intranet features to exchange ideas or provide a procurement site to collaborate between parties on purchasing decisions.

While more physicians are choosing to work at management led organizations for stability, it’s difficult to ignore the decrease in physician satisfaction and morale by a whopping 13% when physicians go this route according to the Bain Report. To counteract this effect, studies have shown that when an organization invests in alignment and engagement between staff, there is an increase in satisfaction. Also, an increase in systematization can garner that highly desired morale booster.  The report states that upcoming generations of care givers have higher expectations around collaboration, purpose, and expect transparency in their organization.  You want staff that so profoundly believe in what they’re doing they will promote you, attract high-level talent and lower staff turnover rates.

You can make use of multiple tools in your Hospital Intranet to build ongoing professional development programs, highlight team building or community events, share photos, and promote peer recognition to build your positive culture.  Engaging Hospital Intranet applications can encourage communication between different departments and lead to an increase in collaboration.

The use of treatment teams and care coordination has doubled in the past two years according to the Bain Report.  As groups come together to streamline patient flow and other processes, it’s often difficult to find good solutions to facilitate these discussions.  A robust online information management system, that includes Online Forms and Automated Workflows, such as a Hospital Intranet platform, can allow you to capture information, automate notifications to necessary departments or staff, and get their approval to move forward.

Tip: It’s also possible to externalize your Hospital Intranet to allow controlled access to physician or Department Sites, documents, Company News or Online Forms that are needed to improve the ability for healthcare staff to work together.

Facilitating knowledge sharing, reducing costs, boosting physician satisfaction and improving coordination between healthcare employees are some of the many benefits that implementing a Hospital Intranet can offer to your organization. That being said, without the ability to measure the impact these initiatives have on your healthcare organization, the efforts may not reach their full potential.

Although it’s clear that your hospital can leverage an intranet to address key issues your experiencing in today’s ever-changing market, the extent to which an intranet can improve your information and management system relies heavily on tracking and measuring results.  Using your Hospital Intranet, you can utilize tools such as; surveys, statistics, analysis of adoption rates and overall satisfaction to ensure you’re getting the results you’re healthcare organization is looking for.