Intranet ROI: The hard cost savings you get from your Healthcare Intranet

Perhaps one of the most overlooked areas in terms of overall budget and organizational savings is printing and paper products. How many thousands of papers, emails, documents and files get printed out on a daily basis within your hospital or healthcare system…How much is spent on something as basic as ink and toner…While many simply consider these necessary and thus somehow negligible expenses, they can definitely start to add up. An Intranet with a solid document management system replaces the cumulative costs associated with printing, distributing, maintaining and storing of hard copy documents.

If you were to measure such things as your organization’s paper usage, software installations and print costs prior to your Intranet implementation, and then conduct this same measurement once the Intranet is up and running, you would certainly note a decrease in the overall time and money allotted to these particular facets of hospital function.

Internal communication in a busy hospital or healthcare setting is constant. The ease with which your Intranet portal handles such communication is often taken for granted. And yet, if you think about it, the money which this process saves simply in paper and printing alone can be significant over a period of time. All of your documents are centrally located, easy to access and quickly dispersed when needed. The amount of paper used drastically decreases, printer supplies and maintenance becomes far less and money is most definitely saved.

Allowing your organization to run more efficiently and in a more streamlined manner, the overall ROI you get from your Intranet platform can be measured in more ways than one. With simple bottom line accounting, you can quickly see how ROI can be achieved in monetary savings, time savings or environmental savings.

These driving points should help marketing teams or IT teams to prove a business case to stakeholders for the purchase of an Intranet:

1. Quicker information searches – Using an Intranet can save staff time. Time = money. If every employee saved 5 minutes per day searching for information, this could save an organization thousands per year. Even basic things that you don’t tend to give a great deal of consideration to…An employee directory for instance. In a hospital of course this is a necessity as people are constantly needing to contact one another. Gone are the multi-page bulky documents containing pertinent contact info. Efficient and fast, the employee directory is now conveniently housed within your portal. Another great time saving is the use of online forms (PTO, Meeting Meal Request, Expenses). These can now be quickly searchable and accessible and contain workflows with approvals saving all of the back and forth time between managers and employees.
2. Reducing the Burden – An easy to use Intranet platform allows for decentralization of content ownership allowing various users to update content reducing the burden on the IT team.
3. Decrease in staff turnover – An Intranet creates staff engagement and boosts employee morale. By retaining one more staff member per year, an organization can save almost 15% of a salary in physician or agency recruitment costs.
4. Policies and Procedures Management Automation – Automated alerts and notifications can tell employees or policy governance groups when policies need to be updated or read. Each day policy owners spend at least 30 minutes to answer these questions…an Intranet can reduce this by 50% saving your organization again on the bottom line productivity costs. Also, from a searchability standpoint, policies can be found in seconds on an Intranet via a keyword, title, or content from the body of a policy. So not only does it save time for the personnel associated with policy management, but the end user can get information within a matter of seconds.
5. Streamlined Processes – We all know how much paper is passed through the HR department. An Intranet can save an HR time on onboarding new hires, processing time off requests or tracking absences, communicating payroll schedules, providing access to employee electronic files and much more.

Implementing an Intranet at your organization can save you thousands on your bottom line. If you have an Intranet and would like to learn more ways you can increase efficiencies using it, please reach out to us at sales@hospitalportal.net. If you don’t have an Intranet and are interested in seeing our solution, please click here for a demo. We look forward to helping your organization save money so you can put it back into the care of the patients and the hospital’s improvements.