3 Benefits of Integrating Policies into Hospital’s Intranet

Have you ever been running late for work, and misplaced your keys? When you started your search for the missing keys you probably started by going to all the various places around the house you would normally leave them. You most likely wouldn’t have checked the back of the freezer, or the bottom of a shoe box, or behind the television set.

Why?

Because you would logically go to the places where they were most likely to be found. Just like the missing keys – you want your policies and procedures to be found in the places your staff most often frequents. 

Having these documents streamlined into day-to-day communications – specifically with an intranet – is an excellent way to ensure staff both on the floor and in the office are not only reviewing these documents on an ongoing basis but adhering to their make-up. With regular organizational updates, a human resource repository, along with other tools and bits of information, the intranet is something your employees frequent, and frequent often.

Benefits of having your hospital’s Policies and Procedures directly integrated with a healthcare Intranet include:

• Easy search functionality

Both clinical and clerical staff use the intranet on a regular basis to search for things like “admitting conditions” or “patient safety”. When policies and procedures are included on the intranet, they will pop up in those searches along with any administrative announcements, general communications, or related new policy information about said topic. This

streamlines your employees effort to collect ALL the information they’re seeking, in one place, as they won’t need to go to a separate repository to locate the specific policies or procedures.

• Ease of Access

Most intranets are set up as browser ‘home pages’ in hospital environments. It’s the first thing people see when they log into their computers each day. If a policy and procedure repository library is not a part of this experience, it is highly likely that any policy and procedure changes will be missed. A good example of this is when an announcement about a new policy change is a made on the homepage of the intranet. When a library is also integrated into this intranet a direct link can be made to the new and old policy, allowing your staff to easily go from an announcement directly to the policy itself.

• Simplified Management of Documents Tasks

When your policy management system is integrated into your intranet the process on the employee’s end because much simpler. A good example of this is when an employee receives an email notification on a new policy or policy change that needs to be reviewed, approved, or attested. Without having to close out one system, and open another to review the critical information the employee has an improved experience, does not suffer any delay in closing and opening various windows which then increases the likelihood of that employee completing policy related tasks based on alerts natively included in their intranet experience.

Just like any other organization, hospitals, clinics and health systems are driven to improve their operational experience.  It’s no surprise that often the main responsibilities of a compliance officer at hospital, clinic, or healthcare system is to ensure both clinical and clerical staff have direct access to and correctly follow the policies and procedures that have been put into place to maintain compliance with the various regulatory bodies.

What’s different, is that in the healthcare environment, the lives, well being and health of patients are dependent upon the effectiveness of operations, and thus are highly scrutinized at every level. Integrating policy and procedure management tools into the intranet, alongside already existing communication tasks delivers the most effective results while at the same time eliminates opportunities for errors and missed information.

To see the HospitalPORTAL Intranet and Policy Management solution in action, schedule your demo here.

For more information on how our products can assist your healthcare organization, check out our healthcare features here or read one of our many helpful blogs.