Case Study: Union Hospital Selects HospitalPortal for New and Improved Intranet

ROLLING MEADOWS, IL, October 11, 2012 (Press-News.org) During the past five years, Union Hospital has experienced significant growth. The employed physician staff has increased from six to nearly 50. A new patient tower and wound care center have expanded the campus. With 1,000 staff members, a thriving health education program, more than 120 daily surgical procedures and 260 affiliated physicians, the hospital needed an intranet that could keep up with the growth.

Union Hospital's first intranet platform was about nine years old and ran on a freeware system. The biggest challenge was that not everyone had access to it. This left staff to search through email strings or miss important messages altogether.

"We needed additional tools to help with communication," said Kathryn McKinney, director of public relations and marketing at Union Hospital, a 122-bed facility that serves Cecil County, Maryland. "We have employees working different shifts and at satellite facilities, so email alone wasn't reaching them. They needed to see important messages multiple times and in different ways."

This was particularly important for communicating policy changes, procedure updates, changes in leadership and events. The old intranet platform required staff to submit a request to IT, which sometimes led to delays. Union Hospital's IT director began researching other systems and assembled a communications committee to make sure the next intranet platform met the organization's needs.

"We had to find the best way to communicate with staff, especially our offsite locations which includes our medical management organization, physician offices, and diagnostic facilities," McKinney added. "We needed a place employees could go to as a central resource."

As the committee compared intranet system vendors, HospitalPortal.net had something the other options didn't -- a specialty in health care.

"I've dealt with similar content management systems from companies who make general solutions. But when you get into the details, it's difficult working with support teams who don't understand the needs you have" said Randy Kelly, the hospital's webmaster. "Health care is very unique -- a lot of acronyms and regulations to keep in mind. When we talked about health care specific topics, like a policy for MRI, HospitalPortal.net knew what we were talking about."

HospitalPortal.net, based in Rolling Meadows, Ill., specializes in Intranet and Policy and Procedure Management solutions for hospitals and health systems. Union Hospital's new intranet was installed on Valentine's Day 2012. Chris Heinl, director of client services, went on site to do a series of staff trainings for the system in May. "Chris and I worked together to edit the pages and components to assure they worked the way I wanted them to.," Kelly said. Though Kelly has a background in front-end web development, many of his colleagues don't. Yet, the system was user friendly enough for him to train other people throughout the summer.

The new intranet officially launched August 2012. So far, nearly 25 staff members have been trained. "They can go in and edit their content freely," Kelly said with a slight tone of relief.

Most importantly, staff and physicians on- and off-site have a central repository for policies and procedures, staff updates and event calendars. "Many of our physicians are more tech savvy; they wanted to see more electronic communications," McKinney said. "Our physicians and employees are definitely more engaged in the hospital."

For example, the CEO requested nominations to establish a new advisory council. "If we had only used email, we probably wouldn't have gotten the same response," she added. But after using the HospitalPortal.net intranet, they immediately got 20 nominations. The CEO's intranet blog has also been popular.

So far, employees have given glowing feedback about the clean appearance and how easy it is to find information. "We've been trying the different features the software has to offer, like the chat features and surveys," McKinney said. "We've just gotten started."

HospitalPortal.net specializes in hospital and healthcare specific web portal solutions, custom software development and system integration services, which includes built-in Joint Commission-compliant document management systems and on-call schedule manager for healthcare facilities.

Website: http://www.hospitalportal.net