The Power of Enterprise 2.0 for Healthcare Delivery

Government-run health care providers aren't usually the type of organizations that embrace emerging technology, but the ones that do often see tremendous benefits. The National Health Service (NHS) of the United Kingdom (the world's 4th largest employer) is one of those.

The trigger was an unfavorable report that was delivered on the state of internal communications at NHS' Orkney division. At roughly the same time, a senior executive was furious at being unable to retrieve his e-mail while on the train. The problem? A 9MB e-mail, loaded with personal photos, was sent to all staff. Faced with a long download to his PDA, the executive abandoned the download and was cut-off from office communication and rendered unresponsive during a long ride.

To address this challenge, NHS Orkney had to move away from e-mail as the primary communications and collaboration vehicle. Simply moving everything to a portal wasn't the answer since they already had one in place and it was poorly utilized. The solution to the problem was an Enterprise 2.0 solution, namely blogs and wikis for content creation and collaboration and RSS feeds for notifications of updates.

The health care provider chose Traction TeamPage (a hybrid blog and wiki platform) and NewsGator Enterprise Server (Enterprise RSS platform) for their solution.

On the blog and wiki side, employees start with a Front Page that rolls up activity in 4 sections: Clinical, Organization, Classified and Personals, and Recent News and Information (a catch all). The source content may have been posted to any one of 11 projects visible to all employees, or from additional projects that require permission. The projects range from Clinical Services to HR, IT and Personals.

The NHS Orkney staff use NewsGator Enterprise Server  to subscribe to internal feeds from Traction. Traction feeds for the most important tags are provided by default, and users can create their own feed based on any search. In this way, incoming information gets filtered and differentiated before they see it, making at-a-glance prioritization possible. In the NewsGator Enterprise Server Web reader interface, feeds from Traction are parsed in a manner that will satisfy the interest area and urgency requirements of a wide variety of readers. As an example, the Clinical Services > Red Alert feed parses out pages in Traction which are tagged Red Alert. The Red Alerts may be monitored carefully by all employees, while other channels are browsed in a a more casual manner.

How have internal communications improved at NHS Orkney? The volume of "corporate spam" has dropped substantially, to the point where they are on the cusp of turning off "all-staff" and other large group mailing lists. The range of information on the blog continues to expand and more staff are starting to use it to work collaboratively and NewsGator Enterprise Server to keep track of updates.

You can read the full case study from Intranet Journal here. Screenshots from the implementation are below.

Technorati Tags: enterprise+rss, rss, NewsGator, Enterprise 2.0, Traction