SharePoint as a Tool for Healthcare Corporations

The capabilities of SharePoint are endless – including its potential to help healthcare corporations. But since the foundation of any IT system for a business lies in the problems and challenges it tries to address, lets briefly look at some challenges that healthcare corporations face and identify how SharePoint could help.

Lack of automated process to give/get real time feedback to/from patient’s relatives.

While a patient is operated, relatives accompanying him/her would love to have every minute update about their loved one (rightly so but this may not be feasible). Imagine if devices are connected some how and the feedback/update can be shared near to real time and queries from those relatives can be replied automatically by systems rather than in person currently. That would surely save lot of time & effort for both staff & relatives, and a quality SharePoint solution – incorporating the workflow and process automation features – could make it happen.

Consistent way of recording quality assurance Standards across various healthcare Institutes.

Quality Assurance is important part of any healthcare institute and hence huge amount of effort is put in by every healthcare institute to be up to mark with QA standards. Now different institutes record & archive reports related to QA in different ways. Idea is to have a standard way to record those reports across institutes. This will save lot of time & cost during auditing & standard way can help build tools to analysis that data to improve & measure the quality.

No platform for knowledge management between network of healthcare institutes.

Knowledge management can be a big challenge in any healthcare institute. In my professional experience I have not seen any KM product or tool effectively used by healthcare staff after initial implementation phase. But the need is there. In my personal view not only the need is there to have Knowledge Management in a Healthcare Institute but across multiple Healthcare Institutes too. Also I don’t think traditional way of knowledge management works for Healthcare industry. I think concept of connected devices to generate network of knowledge sharing and management is the way forward.

Lack of transparency and visibility.

If you are connected with healthcare in any way, I am sure you would agree with me on this. Most of the initiatives in a healthcare institute are implemented tops down, leaving a disconnect with most of the staff members (who are actually executing those initiatives). Also many initiatives are not even shared across the institute. I think solutions like crowd sourcing, Ideas Hub can work really well in improving visibility & transparency.