Healthcare Intranet: What Difference Does It Make?

Healthcare is a vast industry with a diversified workforce. It is one of the most essential sectors as it is concerned with one’s health and involves notable individuals such as doctors, nurses, patients, medical officers, and others. This bustling business faces a lot of challenges when it comes to engaging its varied and time-poor staff. As a result, the healthcare industry urgently demands a single digital platform that brings people, knowledge, and commerce together in one place. 

A Healthcare Intranet is a digital platform that connects and supports all employees, from the CEO to the frontline. It allows them to communicate quickly and easily, boosting the quality of care offered to patients. An Intranet in the Healthcare industry also serves as a resource hub for staff training and education. 

What is Healthcare Intranet used for? 

A Healthcare Intranet is used as a general productivity tool in hospitals, clinics, long-term care facilities, and ambulatory surgery centers. It might be as simple as a couple of landing pages linked to an email system or as complicated as linked databases. It could also be used as an organization’s internal website with features such as on-call calendars, class registration, contract and policy administration, form builders, event calendars, a news feed, document storage and sharing management, videos/galleries, chat rooms, forums, and full profile information. 

Why is it vital to have an Intranet in Healthcare Industry? 

The healthcare industry has undergone a significant technological and economic transformation. However, there is much of room for improvement in both care coordination and cost efficiency, which may be accomplished with the help of a comprehensive Healthcare Intranet. Aside from these, an Intranet can assist the Healthcare Industry to succeed in other ways which are as follows- 

Staff Communication Enhancement 

Communication is crucial to an organization’s growth, and Fan Intranet in the healthcare industry makes it easier to communicate. Many intranets have an Employee Directory, which keeps various details about an organization’s employees in one place. This makes it easier for employees to see and communicate with other members of the team at the right time. Chat board Additionally, features like Employee Onboarding can help in the easy onboarding process of employees and can help them familiarize themselves with the new environment. Furthermore, the Intranet’s tagging capability allows them to tag specific employees so that they are not inundated with irrelevant information and can concentrate on content that interests them.  

A well-designed intranet is intuitive, and it can incorporate elements from popular social media sites to make it easier for employees to use. Staff can be given elements such as ‘Like’ and ‘Comment,’ which will enable them to engage more with the content. This could aid in the development of a digital workplace with a positive feedback loop in which employees feel heard and valued. 

Centralizing Resources 

Hospitals deal in an endless list of documents and files, from employee registration papers to their duty forms, resignations, hospital bills, accounting documents, visiting hour schedules, cafeteria order details, equipment purchase orders, and much more. A Healthcare Intranet serves as a central repository for various information and documents. A Document Management System makes it easier to organize, store, share, and find these crucial papers. This paperless method of fast file storing and retrieval helps management save time and money. 

A comprehensive Hospital Intranet can also help with internal administration activities like cafeteria management, invoicing and accounting, and HR materials. An Intranet in the healthcare industry automates process flows so that only authorized individuals receive specific files and the processing time is decreased, resulting in cutting costs with better patient care. 

Patient Care Improvement 

The primary goal of any healthcare organization is to take care of its patients and therefore finding ways to improve the patient’s experience becomes critical in the Healthcare sector. A robust Intranet offers a wide range of features and applications to take a step ahead in improving patient care including- 

• Staff Education and Training 

For better patient care, it’s vital to keep up with changes in operational procedures, industry best practices, and technology. Through its unique characteristics, a Healthcare Intranet can assist stimulate continual learning and engagement. Employees can use an Intranet Knowledge Management tool to find blogs, FAQs, Best Practices, and Educational Documents quickly. The cost-effective up-skilling of staff is made possible by instant access to these training materials. In addition, tools such as an Attendance Tracking System can make check-in, check-out, and automatic registrations in any course program easier. It displays available courses and if the maximum number of students is achieved, the course will display as full. This automates time-consuming manual operations, freeing up time for other important responsibilities.  

• Feedback on Patient Treatment 

Feedback is essential for self-growth. Hospitals can benefit from a built-in application that successfully handles feedback allowing staff members to log in, track, collaborate, and design plans. These comments can be handled using an approval system in which they are routed through the admin and only displayed once they have been accepted. 

• Physician availability Calendar  

A SharePoint calendar can help to track the availability and schedules of busy doctors and physicians so work in tandem during emergencies.  

• Online Survey and Assessments 

A Healthcare Intranet with pre-built employee tests and a survey tool improves patient care by ensuring that all employees are informed of current regulations and procedures. Automated scoring, for example, aids in the automatic detection of correct and erroneous answers. Staff members can retake the survey to test their knowledge if necessary. These responses are sent to the supervisor for approval resulting in improved worker knowledge while also providing authorities with a comprehensive picture of the situation. 

• Fundraising Site 

Raising awareness and support for healthcare and community concerns can be significant to a healthcare’s objective of providing high-quality patient care. Promoting fundraising activities is easier with an intranet that includes a pre-built fundraising portal. Registration forms and an Event Timeline can aid in organizing successful fundraising events. 

Enhances Departmental Collaboration 

Hospitals have specialty departments and every department has its own set of policies and procedures, as well as its own work culture. Thus, collaboration in healthcare becomes quite difficult but an Intranet with Department Sites can help. 

Each Department site has its own News Feed, and content from this section can be pushed to the main home page to notify the rest of the organization about the department’s activities and events. There can be as many department sites as needed for various wards such as neurology, pediatrics, cardiology, maternity, palliative care, orthopedics, and so on. Each site includes its own home page, menu navigation, pages, and apps that are tailored to the department’s needs. As a result, departmental staff gains valuable information that, if necessary, may be shared with other related departments or the entire hospital with minimal effort and time. As a result, an Intranet increases departmental collaboration and efficiency in the healthcare industry. 

 Cost Efficiency 

Healthcare organizations unnecessarily spent a lot of money due to a lack of consistency in patient treatment. Poor workplace communication and an inability to identify the source of the problem contribute to an increase in organizational costs. This can be addressed through workplace digitization, as automation streamlines operations and helps save money. 

Doctors and other healthcare workers benefit from Intranets as they can access standard treatment guidelines online. This can be accomplished through the use of presentation films, pictures, and documentaries, which can be sent to stakeholders and investors in a systematic manner. 

Also, using Intranet, several other manual chores that need a lot of manpower and paperwork can be accomplished with only a few people and in less time. This saves a significant amount of money for health organizations, which can be put to better use elsewhere. 

Increases Employee Satisfaction and Morale 

Employees are the lifeblood of every business, and they can only provide their best when they are happy with their jobs and working environment. Their morale and efficiency are compromised when they are dissatisfied.  

Employee engagement and satisfaction require a positive work culture and a pleasant environment. They function best in a stress-free workplace and when they feel appreciated. An Intranet provides them with an equal opportunity to collaborate in healthcare. Features like Birthday Reminders make individuals feel as if they are being remembered. With additional capabilities such as a recognition system, an intranet in the healthcare industry can be used to reward and retain top-performing personnel, resulting in improved team performance and job satisfaction.  

Improves Security 

Healthcare organization holds highly sensitive information which becomes easy targets for fraudsters and hackers. According to a report by the US Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights, in 2020 alone, security breaches increased by 25% and around 89% of providers suffered a data breaches in 2019 and 2020. 

A SharePoint Healthcare Intranet can help provide security to the highly sensitive data as it is built on Active Directory which is GDPR compliant. Access to vital data can also be granted via form-based authentication. Furthermore, SharePoint’s extensive privacy controls and permission levels make it much easier for organizations to regulate who has access to which documents, files, and folders. As a result, it improves security by ensuring that only authorized persons have access to a piece of information, while the rest of the staff is unable to access it. 

Conclusion 

An Intranet in the Healthcare Industry not only improves patient care and collaboration but also helps organizations analyze what has been accomplished and where they need to improve through analytics and reporting.  

Our Microsoft-certified professionals possess strong capabilities in Intranet design and development as per your business needs. If you’re interested in a Healthcare Intranet but aren’t sure if it’ll help your company grow, contact us to get a better idea. Beyond Intranet will assist you with the best services.