eXo Platform To Boost Collaboration in Healthcare institutions
Organizations across different industries are constantly looking to adapt to technological advancements to satisfy the growing demands of their workforce and customers. As a result, digital workplace solutions have been progressively embraced as they act as an all-in-one solution capable of facilitating communication, collaboration, and streamlining business processes.
In previous blog posts as well as on our website, we have discussed how our solution can help businesses across different industries.
In this blog post, we will discuss the challenges facing healthcare institutions and how eXo Platform can help address these challenges.
Challenges:
Healthcare institutions from hospitals to pharmacies and laboratories are in an endless quest to provide excellent service and care for their customers and patients. As a highly regulated industry, institutions also have to be compliant with industry standards like safety, privacy and billing practices. To achieve these goals, healthcare institutions have to overcome a number of challenges mainly related to internal communication.
Below are the main challenges facing the healthcare industry.
Disconnection:
Disconnected teams and departments is an issue regardless of the industry. However, in a risky and time pressured environment like is the case in healthcare, disconnection can have severe consequences for the health and safety of staff and patients. Traditional communication tools like e-mail and pagers are still in use within healthcare institutions. Although practical in some cases, these communication tools leave a great room for miscommunication and are not suited for institutions with numerous departments and subsidiaries. Vivalto Santé, one of eXo Platform clients and one of the leading providers of private hospital services in France, encountered this issue. It made them look for a solution capable of bringing together their different teams, departments and subsidiaries.
“Our challenge was to make sure each establishment feels part of the Vivalto group. Above all, we wanted to facilitate collaboration between and within them to foster the sharing of experience and information across the group. For example, a hygienist who works alone at a clinic would be able to interview his colleagues at the 25 facilities and benefit from their experience,” says Olivier Boixière, CIO at Vivalto Santé.
Access to information:
Whether in a critical situation like an emergency surgery or just a basic inquiry at the reception desk, having access to information is crucially important. With a diverse workforce made of frontline staff like nurses, clinical assistants and ward clerks and in office staff like doctors and laboratory professionals, a rich knowledge base is what connects these teams and makes information easily accessible. Traditionally, information is spread across different departments and teams. This means that staff has to navigate across different platforms or ask the right people for permissions to locate, access and share valuable information. This results on a significant increase in time spent looking for information which eventually leads to a decrease in productivity.
Tools and applications overload:
Healthcare institutions with several departments and subsidiaries often rely on different applications and platforms to assist their daily operations. They range from intranets to knowledge management systems and instant messaging platforms. The multitude of applications used means that employees spend a considerable amount of time switching between these tools to perform their jobs.
Customer portal:
Having a patient portal is key to enhance communication between healthcare institutions and their patients. However, as they contain sensitive information, portals are always associated with security and data loss concerns. These concerns coupled with the difficulty to navigate through some portals make patients reluctant to adopt them.
Benefits:
Enable collaboration for better patient care
eXo Platform allows healthcare institutions to connect their teams thanks to its large array of integrated features. These features include an Enterprise Social Network (ESN), Knowledge and task management, an intranet and more.
With the ESN, staff whether frontline or in-office can communicate and create dedicated spaces to collaborate more effectively. Employees can also interact on different types of content (files, articles, discussions, videos, images, etc…) via likes, comments and shares. Searching for the right individuals (via name, job title, skills and departments) to perform and assist specific operations is made easy thanks to the integrated search functionality. The availability of eXo Platform on mobile devices with all its features is convenient for consumer facing personnel.
Enhance internal communication:
eXo Platform with its social capabilities helps to improve communication whether top-down, cross departmental or peer-to-peer.
Communication and HR professionals can convey the latest news and events inside the institution within dedicated spaces. These spaces are customizable in terms of both design (page layout) and content (microblogs, wikis, etc.).
This way, personnel, whenever they are, can always be updated on the latest activities within the institution. This eventually results in a more engaged and informed workforce.
Facilitate knowledge sharing and medical learning
Thanks to eXo Platform’s integrated Knowledge Management System, personnel from different departments can locate, access and share various types of information with ease. This ensures an increase in productivity as personnel spend less time searching for information. It also helps teams to build a knowledge base of information for problem, learning and decision making.
Improve patients’ experience with patients’ portal
eXo Platform’s advanced content management capabilities allow healthcare institutions to build patient portals. These portals are capable of improving communication between institutions and patients as they contain a built-in chat application and a number of dedicated spaces. This way a patient can make an appointment, a request or get in touch with his/her doctor by a simple message or post. Portals also allow patients to have more control over their profiles and correct or update any inaccuracies.
Providing excellent patient care and being complaint with industry regulations are the main priorities for healthcare institutions. To achieve these goals, these institutions are progressively looking for digital workplace solutions capable of facilitating communication, collaboration, knowledge sharing and overall productivity. In this blog post, we have discussed how eXo Platform can help address the challenges in the healthcare industry thanks to its social approach and the variety of its features.
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Brahim Jaouane
I am a Digital Marketing specialist specialized in SEO at eXo Platform. Passionate about new technologies and Digital Marketing. With 10 years' experience, I support companies in their digital communication strategies and implement the tools necessary for their success. My approach combines the use of different traffic acquisition levers and an optimization of the user experience to convert visitors into customers. After various digital experiences in communication agencies as well as in B2B company, I have a wide range of skills and I am able to manage the digital marketing strategy of small and medium-sized companies.