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Healing Administrative Aches for Better Patient Care

Written by Portage CyberTech | Nov 1, 2023 8:59:38 PM

Improving digital public services doesn’t only apply to governments and municipalities. Large organizations are often plagued by the same issues as the public sector: disconnected services and overly numerous points of access.

Addressing these issues is a necessary step for large organizations to ensure their digital services are on par with user expectations.  

To illustrate how these issues can hold organizations back and how solving them can improve the lives of their customers, users and employees, let’s analyze an example scenario.

This is the story of Maria, an IT solutions manager in a large hospital group whose challenges are representative of the challenges of many large organizations across North America.

Setting the Scene

Maria is the IT solutions manager for a large hospital group. Handling digital services across so many different locations and administrative bodies has proved challenging for the group.

Externally, they have received numerous complaints from patients who are having difficulty finding information about services scattered across multiple hospital websites.

Internally, human resources have been struggling to keep up with the requirements of the different hospitals in the group since now, many healthcare professionals are called to work across multiple hospital sites.  

Giving Patients Information, Not Headaches

When the medical institutions in Maria’s hospital group decided to come together, they were eager to provide more and better services to patients by allowing each hospital to specialize.

Unfortunately, many patients have reported difficulties navigating the numerous websites and sources of information.

By digging a little deeper, Maria determines that this is especially true when patients are looking for information provided at a hospital other than their home hospital.

For example, she contacts one patient who is under the care of a specialist at one hospital, but has been referred to a pain clinic at another one.

The patient reports that this confusion caused delays in their treatment, significantly impacting the quality of care they received as well as their overall quality of life.

Maria wants to find a way to unify access to information across the entire hospital group. By doing so, she hopes to simplify patients’ access to information and care. However, she also knows that each hospital would prefer to retain control over their digital services.

She needs a solution that will allow patients to have a single point of access to information but will not disrupt or modify the digital services that each hospital already has in place.

By using a solution such as CitizenOne and its Services Catalog Accelerator (SCA) feature, Maria could satisfy both requirements. SCA’s consolidated dashboard would ensure users always know where to go to find the information they need.

Furthermore, with a single set of credentials to access the dashboard and its robust search feature, CitizenOne’s SCA would streamline patients’ access to care.

CitizenOne and its SCA provide self-serve configuration capabilities for consolidating access to digital services without disrupting the ways in which each hospital already manages its websites and the publication of web content.

Services from each hospital could be displayed on cards within the dashboard alongside similar or related services without needing to make any changes to the hospital’s website.

Essentially, CitizenOne’s SCA would act as a group-wide searchable catalog for patients, while leaving the digital service delivery processes already in place at each hospital unaffected.

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Building Effective Care from the Ground Up

Since the hospital group was created, healthcare professionals have had issues navigating internal digital services.

Members of the staff have reported particular difficulties accessing human resource-related services such as health insurance and vacation details.

Maria thinks this is likely because the hospital group chose to take over the management of large programs and benefits but let each department continue to oversee staffing issues individually.

This decision was made with the goal of reducing the administrative load placed on each department while maintaining their agency and minimizing disruptions for staff. 

Maria reaches out to department heads, human resources officers, and members of staff to determine the root of the problem.

During these conversations, she observes that the administrative workload placed on departments has indeed been reduced and disruptions to staffing have been minimal. However, employees have been struggling to navigate the new system.

They don’t know where to find the information they’re looking for or who has been designated as their point of contact for each program. Maria would like to find a way to maintain the current system while removing confusion for staff.

When she takes some time to consider the problem, Maria realizes that the internal situation is very similar to the external issues she had previously addressed.

She therefore concludes that CitizenOne and its SCA would solve the problems at hand in the same ways it did before. She is also happy to note that the unified platform will further simplify the administrative process by consolidating all employee information in one secure location by using existing assets.

Removing Confusion to Focus on Care

Like many organizations, Maria's hospital group can address two of its largest pain points with a single solution.

As part of Portage CyberTech’s CitizenOne solution, the SCA was designed to be a flexible, configurable tool for governments and large organizations to integrate into their overall digital strategy.

Its inherent security features, consent-based approach to data privacy, interoperability, and intuitive UX can help smoothly consolidate your digital strategy.

Find out more about CitizenOne’s Services Catalog Accelerator and how it can improve your organization’s digital services!