Enterprise Healthcare Intranet

Discovery

UMass Memorial and its digital partner Centretek led an extensive discovery effort to create an intranet strategy that provided a roadmap for the design and development of the newly integrated website. This discovery work included:

• Listening closely to employees: The team gathered valuable feedback from 1,500-plus employees through focus groups, one-on-one interviews and surveys.
• Understanding best practices: We also talked, visited and attended seminars with health care and other organizations to benefit from their lessons learned. 
• Defining a next intranet generation: The team then catalogued employees’ feedback and frustrations with current intranet to define overall features set and required integrations.
• A current- to future-state transformation: Based on user experience and issues with the then-current intranet sites, established an information architecture plan and new visual design guidelines supporting employee communications branding strategy.
• Envisioned an entirely new technology platform: Based on our findings, we provided evaluation and recommendations for next UMass Memorial platform.

Implementation

The initial technical approach was to build the new intranet using Microsoft’s SharePoint Online platform Office 365 as part of enterprise-wide initiative; however, this platform choice changed due to extended delays with Office 365 rollout across the health care system. In addition, there were concerns about functionality and design flexibility after the development of the initial proof of concept. As a result, the UMass Memorial Information Services (IS) and Marketing and Communications teams decided to build the new intranet with Drupal on the Acquia Cloud (leveraging the dedicated Acquia Shield isolated environment for added security). Additionally, Solr search was integrated to provide a rich, customizable and scalable search interface within Drupal.

Following the Drupal platform change decision, the Hub project team – comprised of UMass Memorial Marketing and Communications and Information Services (IS) team members and the Centretek implementation team – began working in earnest. Over the course of seven development sprints, the Hub project team completed the following to implement the site:

• Drafting, review and approval of technical build requirements
• Development of site features and functionality
• User experience and visual design
• Integration of employee data from multiple sources for site personalization
• Usability testing
• Content strategy & development
• User training
• Soft launch and final testing
• Communications rollout

Results

Today, the Hub provides a centralized platform for employees to easily locate essential resources for the entity where they work and across the system. With the Hub, employees communicate and collaborate with colleagues throughout the entire organization. Furthermore, the Hub offers an intuitive user experience and visually engaging design that supports the organization’s brand and award-winning “Everyone, Everyday” internal employee engagement campaign.

Highlights of the Hub include:

• Rich search feature, including filtering by content type and hospital affiliation.
• A document management system that provides robust global site search and within four document library repositories (policies, forms, resources and department/programs) by keywords, entity and entity-specific categories.
• Streamlined navigation for optimal user experience. Examples include top-level and footer navigation, personalized content on the dashboard (landing page) based on employees’ entity(ies) including news articles, events, quick links and featured spotlight slide.
• A single, integrated news channel via Hub News. This feature has the flexibility to share news system-wide and by entity. Top stories appear on the dashboard and are listed on the News landing page as a listing. News features can also be tagged to be featured on the MyHR section.
• Integrated calendar functionality features entity-specific and system-wide events on the dashboard and event landing page. Important events can be tagged to be featured on top of the list.
• “Water Cooler” section to promote employee engagement through fun, interactive content including employee discounts, volunteer calendar, polls and photo sharing. Other Water Cooler features including a discussion board and classifieds feature will be rolled out in 2020.
• Drupal supports an extensive publishing model with flexible user roles and access that provide three levels of publishing and editing permissions by entity or system-wide assignments: editor, publisher and administrator.
• Governance structure applied to every content type to ensure content is reviewed and approved before being published.
• Expiry notification process that prompts editors and content owners to review content that hasn’t been updated in a year, so content stays fresh.
• Dynamic access control and content personalization that presents information to users based on their job/role and entity affiliation(s).
• Active Directory integrations to allow seamless access for all employees within the organization and available via web login.
• Completely refreshed content that provides current and accurate information, removing multiple versions of documents and outdated content.
• Mobile-optimized design will provide an enhanced and convenient user experience within the UMass Memorial network. The IS team is currently working to implement mobile access via the organization’s IBM-developed MaaS360 app.
• Supports accessibility guidelines and best practices (ADA and WCAG 2.1).

Post-launch Feedback

When the Hub went live in feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, and the Marketing and Communications and IS departments were pleased with the overall results.

• Increased sessions and pageviews.
• Employees expressed their gratitude for the powerful, new search functionality, which means no more workarounds because employees can find what they need right at their fingertips. 
• The personalized approach to content based on where employees work has been very well received, and so has the ability to access other entity information.
• Post launch, employees were quick to let marketing know when they couldn’t find information they needed, and we were equally responsive in fixing those issues in return. In addition, support staff manning the IS Support Center were trained and given scripts and job aids to help answer Hub-related questions, which are also shared on the Hub’s Contact Us page
• Following the launch of the site, demand for new department pages spiked as groups across the system chose to take advantage of the greatly improved functionality, personalized approach and overall site performance.
• To drive traffic to the Hub post launch, the Communications team created and launched a “Hub Hunt” game designed to educate employees about new navigation and engage them with the new site via a weekly quiz question posted on the dashboard. Employees were awarded prizes ranging from UMass Memorial branded swag, Yeti travel mugs and theater tickets. Close to 5,000 participated.
• Finally, to change employee behavior from being “spoon fed” content via mass email to going to the Hub for news and content, the Communications team launched a weekly e-newsletter called Hub Highlight. This new channel teases new features with fun and provocative content; employees must go to the Hub to read the stories. To date, the open rate for Hub Highlights averages between 50 to 60% each week.

As a centralized source of vital content, it will truly become the hub of employee communications, eliminating the need for one-off mass emails and other time-consuming and disjointed communications. With a governance structure that is built into the day-to-day workflow of the site, the Hub is created to ensure content remains current and accurate. This provides employees with the long-desired single source of truth that will enhance work productivity and efficiency.

Sample screenshots follow illustrating the look-and-feel, navigation and functionality of the Hub.

Personalized Dashboard (Home Page)

• The hero (banner) section is personalized based on data fed from the Hub’s integration with active directory.
• News and events content is based on a user’s primary and secondary entities/affiliations.
• Important events are tagged to be featured on top of the list.
• The spotlight slideshow accommodates storyboard functionality for the Everyone, Everyday internal employee engagement program. (Not show, appears lower on the page)

• “Water Cooler” blocks and navigation (main, utility and footer) are based on a user’s primary entity. (Not show, appears lower on the page)

MyHR Section

• The MyHR landing page provides its own specific navigation below the banner image to assist employees with locating information handily.
• MyHR, developed on an entity basis, corrals all HR content, from webpages documents, policies to forms that is accessed by the appropriate persons. Each page is strictly targeted based on employees’ entity(ies) and their employment status and role, including those with benefits, affiliated with union groups, and employees, managers and physicians. This allows for a personalized experience, tailored to the specific user. It also gives the HR team assurance that content is viewable by the appropriate persons.
• A slider feature provides a visual feature and quick access to HR programs.
• News and Events. The administrative interface allows for users with publishing and editing access to tag news articles and events to show up on each entity’s MyHR landing page.

Departments

• This main section allows for departments and programs to create pages for all department/program-specific content. Users have options to search the listing alphabetically and to filter based on entity and keyword.
• The department landing pages allow for the page creators to customize images, callouts, right navigational elements, etc. to fit the content they would like to post on the page. The templates are flexible for small or large amounts of content.
• This template also allows for teams to be highlighted and provides interdepartmental communication and knowledge sharing.