St. Vincent’s Healthcare Group Ltd. St Vincent’s Healthcare Group, (incorporating St Vincent’s University Hospital, St Vincent’s Private Hospital and St Michael’s Hospital) provides acute general medical care serving the South East region of Dublin and surrounding areas. The annual turnover of the Group in 2005 was €272m, and the total Group capital expenditure over 2004 and 2005 was €101m.
Having already implemented a new corporate website for St. Vincent’s Healthcare Group, we were approached to take a look at their effectiveness of the old St. Vincent’s Intranet. Our Strategy Team worked with the Groups IT Department to undertake an intensive audit and we produced a set of detailed findings and recommendations which were presented internally within the Group. We identified that there was a lot that could be done to improve how effective the Intranet was as a communications channel within the Group and as an assistive tool to daily hospital operations.
All highly successful Intranets are dependent on the right mix of people, process and technology to succeed. We formulated a strategy for the Group that would start with defining a user experience which met the needs of frontline staff and patients. We also worked with the Group to establish an Intranet Content Team to who would be champions of the Intranet internally and encourage regular content updates and additions. This is essential to build momentum and communicate the value of the Intranet.
Our Technology Team worked with Group IT to put in place a Technical Architecture which would be able to meet the needs of hundreds of daily concurrent users within the Hospitals operated by the Group. Hospitals depend on rock solid IT infrastructure which can easily scale to meet spikes in demand. We implemented the Ektron CMS as the underlying platform to power the Intranet. Ektron CMS is particularly suited to Intranets given it’s excellent collaboration suite and social networking tools.
The Intranet was launched in early 2009 and has been very well received with the group. We continue to work with St. Vincent’s Healthcare Group on the next phase of the development of their Intranet.
Staff, Students and Contractors now use a simple web application to report, track and manage maintenance requests for DCU campus facilities.
