How Withum’s Digital Team provided a “cure” for a medical centers intranet problem.
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Executive Summary
Withum’s Digital team upgraded a large nonprofit medical center in Maryland to custom intranet on Office 365 and SharePoint Online. With the use of the OneWindow Toolkit, Withum’s team created an intranet with fixed and fluid pages allowing customization, machine learning and easy information locating and sharing. The new intranet rollout included training on how to efficiently use the new system for proper utilization at launch and in the future.
The Client
A nonprofit medical center located in Salisbury, MD, renowned as the largest and most experienced health care provider in the region. Founded in 1897, it has been meeting the healthcare needs of Delmarva Peninsula residents for over 100 years. Its 3,300 physicians, staff and volunteers serve nearly 500,000 patients yearly across all specialties.
The Challenge
The hospital’s intranet was outdated and underused – running on an outdated version of SharePoint and the most viewed page was the cafeteria menu. Before the upgrade, the site allowed content managers to own department pages and share information with team members and the larger hospital audience. However, like many organizations, some personnel were active in managing their pages, but more were not. That left a collection of stale, old and irrelevant content. As a result, people weren’t using the intranet to find the information they needed, and the look of it was inconsistent and off-brand.
Hospital team members needed a technology solution that could help them tackle industry challenges, support their new growth on the peninsula and facilitate new initiatives. The staff with hungry for collaborative technology they could use for project management, workflows, electronic forms and easy content sharing.
The hospital’s IT team knew they needed a new intranet. They looked to leverage their current investment in Office 365 into a cloud-based digital workplace that could support their diverse user base and scale as they continued growth.
The Approach and Solution
Withum’s team of digital experts configured a new custom intranet on SharePoint Online and Office 365. It featured a fresh look and feel, and organized information architecture, new layouts, and global navigation.
Withum’s digital team built the intranet through a three-phase approach:
- Content migration analysis and planning.
- Intranet design.
- Policy center creation.
Content Migration Analysis and Planning
Withum completed the analysis and planning phases for the content migration from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint Online. As part of the migration, Withum’s team established a Content-Type Hub and Taxonomy Term Store to ensure effective and efficient information management, as well as supporting dynamic searches and filtering through metadata tagging.
Intranet Design
As part of the new design, Withum created department sites that were both flexible and standardized. Uniform page templates made it easy for end-users to find what they need easily, and owners still could customize their sites to fit the needs of the department. Implementing both a standard, fixed design at the beginning of the layout, and a fluid design at the end of the layout gave the hospital staff structured flexibility. The fixed design allowed customizations for web parts such as links and recent documents, and the fluid design allowed site owners to add additional web parts to their page that could tie into their custom document libraries and lists. Withum’s Digital OneWindow Toolkit helped create new web parts to support sharing information and hospital news. For example, Withum’s team created a new web part that acts as a key performance indicator (KPI), showing the Emergency Room vacancy rates.
Policy Center Creation
Finally, Withum’s Digital Team created a new policy center for the entire medical group that housed official company policies and procedures. The policy center was customized to include information retention schedules for policy management, thus ensuring accuracy and relevancy of posted policies, as well as unique permissions based on the departments and groups who own each policy.
Withum also used governance and training to ensure the new intranet is used correctly at launch and in the future.
contact a member of Withum’s Advisory Team.
The Results
At the end of the digital transformation engagement, the hospital had a new and upgraded digital workplace on Office 365 and SharePoint Online. Their old intranet on the SharePoint 2010 environment was archived, with the appropriate parts migrated over. The new intranet included:
- A clean and attractive site design that is on-brand and consistent across all pages.
- A new and updated policy center that treats the policies as records and allows for easy and traceable management of policies by content owners.
- An out-of-the-box mobile-responsive platform that leverages the SharePoint modern framework.
- An effective enterprise search that leverages machine learning and assists in getting users to content.
- A more manageable platform that’s easier for the IT Department and Office 365/Intranet Manager to maintain, allowing greater bandwidth to support other critical needs for the hospital.
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