Learn how a regional healthcare provider overhauled their existing Microsoft 365-based system to efficiently communicate the correct information to the right person at the right time.
Executive Summary
A health and wellness system company’s comprehensive administrative system requested support to further leverage their existing Microsoft 365 infrastructure to build a unified intranet and communications experience across team members at their many locations. Working together with Microsoft, Withum capitalized on an existing partnership to establish the company’s Microsoft Teams environment and utilize Withum’s OneWindow Workplace Intranet-as-a-service.
The Client
The healthcare provider client serves over one million patients across the Mid-Atlantic region. It also includes several hospital campuses, a 600,000-member health plan, research centers and a medical school, along with over 30,000 employees.
The Challenge
With team members situated across many different locations, communications and digital collaboration at the health system compete with the, literally, life-or-death actions that team members handle each day. As technology adopters, the client built an initial communications foundation that had since spread to several solutions, causing current users to struggle to access up-to-date content. With no single source of truth, both clinical and non-clinical workers did not trust the disparate systems that needed consolidating.
Because of the information overload for workers, important information that needed to be disseminated and digested was ignored, likely because it was lost in less relevant communications.
The Approach And Solution
As a current and established partner with the client for over five years, Withum has provided continued support through the Healthcare Services team. This relationship boosted a conversation that highlighted the healthcare company’s opportunity for assistance with Microsoft Teams and an intranet upgrade. Withum was then brought in to execute this project.
The initial project consisted of two stages:
- First, a Microsoft Teams assessment on integrating with current systems and a long-term governance strategy
- Second, a review of the client’s intranet consolidation project from the classic SharePoint Online and a system called InfoWeb
From the success of this first project, Withum’s work expanded into a proof of concept for improving enterprise search capabilities across the client’s new SharePoint Online Intranet. This work included how to use “tagging” and “attributes” inside Microsoft 365 to make finding information more straightforward. Withum also provided detailed guidance on publishing news and getting important information to the right workers at the right time. This project involved segmenting communications by clinical vs. non-clinical workers, locations, roles, etc.
Working closely with the company’s internal communications and Microsoft Focused team, the Withum team highlighted key areas of opportunity that could be addressed with minimal business impact, even during the disruption created by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Results, ROI
The consolidation efforts resulted in a few changes, but most notably, the ability for:
- Communications teams to create messages in one place
- Disseminate the communications across different mediums/places and
- Have communications segmented so that all parties (like clinical nurses) would only see the information that is appropriate to them
This effort was supported by consolidating into one SharePoint-based intranet, with both Microsoft’s modern experience and Withum’s OneWindow Workplace.
The new communications experience is strongly felt when the client interacts with the revised Human Resources content, including navigation, page layout and search results to bring forward the most relevant information for visitors.
The project resulted in a continued and strengthened partnership with Withum that includes a subscription to OneWindow Intranet and ongoing services around Microsoft Search, adoption and change management, user interface/user experience work and Microsoft Dynamics training.
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