3 ways to keep your intranet going forever

There can be many ways that your HOSPITAL’S INTRANET can fizzle out and lose the staff’s engagement…

This can happen for various reasons: Employee turnover of key intranet editors, disinterest from the staff and lack of updated information just to name of few. In this blog post I want to give some tips on how to prevent the intranet from succumbing from these pitfalls.

In my experience, one of the struggles that plague intranets is when the people that know the intranet the most, leave the hospital. This leaves the remaining employees struggling to find a replacement and can leave the hospital’s intranet to not be updated for quite some time. This is detrimental to its use. To prevent this from happening to your intranet, having more than one “expert” in the intranet is necessary. Sometimes a few employees are necessary to ensure this doesn’t happen to you. They all should be up to date on updates from the vendor and be in close contact with them. This will ensure that if one leaves, the others can take over in a heartbeat. Having an active portal governance team is one of the approaches that works well for many hospitals as it creates shared ownership of their Intranet.

Another pitfall is a staff that just isn’t interested enough to use the intranet or don’t find a need to visit it. If people aren’t using the intranet, then people get disinterested in updating the intranet. Eventually the intranet fizzles out. To prevent this from happening, create some engaging content. Things like training videos and other types of media can help with this. Having some interactive aspects of the intranet such as surveys or forums is a good way to bring people back to the intranet as well. If you keep the intranet interesting enough, they will come.

Always keeping the intranet updated with the latest information from your department or the hospital is also a great way to keep employees coming back to the hospital’s intranet forever. The Intranet home page is one of the areas that needs to be constantly updated and kept fresh. Even if there isn’t any announcements that you need to post, post something. Putting up a tip of the week for your department, or a writing a bog post might be a good way to keep your page fresh and worth going to every day.

Keeping an intranet going forever takes some work. If you follow these tips, it will be easier to keep it afloat.