Why It’s Important to “Socialize” Your Healthcare Communications Strategy

Key Takeaways

Every healthcare communications strategy requires socialization. It’s not enough to arbitrarily post news updates or email out a new policy update and hope for the best. You need to ensure employees read, understand, and embody the guidance given. In this article, we explain the barriers to communication in healthcare, and list 9 key steps for socializing messages across your frontline-heavy workforce.

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Only 20% of healthcare organizations “socialize” their key strategic documents and communications, according to a recent Gallagher report.

By socialization, we’re referring to your ability to distribute internal communications, enforce employee acceptance and understanding, and bake strategic guidance into daily operations. It’s about ensuring your communications permeate below the surface and have a lasting impact.

Healthcare organizations that do this successfully are 50% more likely to reduce missed KPIs. Resulting in improved efficiency, morale, and patient outcomes.

The question is: why is it so difficult for 80% of healthcare organizations to achieve this? And what can be done to strengthen their communications strategy?

The unique communications challenges in healthcare

With a high percentage of frontline workers on the payroll, it’s not surprising that many healthcare organizations struggle with communications. Distance makes it difficult to reach workers, and busy shift patterns leave little room for sit down conversations or long intranet sessions.

But disparate and deskless workforces aren’t solely to blame.

At its core, socialization requires an active communications strategy. Yet, according to Gallagher’s research, healthcare organizations produce the lowest volume of strategic and change messaging across all industries. (71% and 67% respectively.)

Furthermore, unfit technology environments make distributing and disseminating these messages all the more difficult. Only 29% of healthcare organizations say their systems flex with their strategic goals. And 60% admit to suffering from a significant platform integration crisis, with manual processes, outdated systems, and fragmented tools negatively impacting comms socialization and operational efficiency.

Fixing these root causes requires careful strategic and technical planning.

In the following 9 steps, we’ll help you build a robust framework for your healthcare communications strategy. One

How to socialize your healthcare communications strategy in 9 steps

1. Centralize your communications in a mobile-friendly platform

The first step is to address the elephant in the room: your fragmented tech stack.

When strategy updates, SOPs, policies, and day-to-day messages all live in disparate channels, your socialization efforts don’t stand a chance. There’s no glue holding your knowledge together or definitive source of truth. Your employees will inevitably forget where documents live and waste their valuable time hunting for information. They may even miss critical updates altogether.

Centralizing your communications in a single, secure platform is therefore a necessity. By replacing your sprawled tech stack with one solution, you increase the chances of messages being seen, read, learnt, and revisited.

When choosing a digital workplace, prioritize a solution that’s mobile-accessible, HIPAA compliant, and able to scale with your organization’s needs.

Claromentis’s digital workplace is a great choice for heavily regulated healthcare organizations that wish to modernize their communications and operations without compromising compliance. Our solution contains intranet, e-learning, automation, knowledge management, and policy management capabilities all in one, as well as innovative AI functionality and robust security features.

2. Finetune user experiences

Once you’ve selected your digital workplace, you’ll need to plan your site design, navigation, and structure — for your existing and future content. It’s not enough to simply share a strategic message and hope it sticks. Employees must be able to access this content whenever they need it, no matter where they are.

Map various scenarios across your workforce. What content might your doctors need during a typical shift? Perhaps information regarding drug interactions or referral procedures, or policies for reporting a patient to social services. Alternatively, domiciliary nurses may require fast access to patient care plans and digital MAR charts.

Consider what content each user needs and how your digital workplace can speed-up information retrieval. Best practices include:

• Creating menus that are clear and easy to navigate, with obvious links to knowledge bases, policy libraries, and document management systems.
• Building dedicated intranet spaces and/or pages for departments and teams.
• Designing pages intuitively, and adding buttons to frequently used external resources (such as government websites).
• Making sure important strategic comms channels — like news feeds and urgent updates — are placed front and center on the homepage.
• Personalizing experiences with granular user permissions — ensuring users see content relevant to their role and responsibilities.
• Harnessing AI search functionality to speed-up information discovery and provide workers with accurate, cited summaries and overviews.
• Localizing important site content and messages to ensure non-native English speakers can understand your communications.

3. Use the right channels for the right messages

To improve the chances of your messages reaching the right audience, at the right time, and in the right way, you need to adopt a holistic communications and socialization approach.

This means choosing the appropriate channels for each piece (or type) of communication. For instance, you could use:

• Pop-up banners with compulsory read-accept tick boxes for urgent announcements.
• News feeds for top-down, strategic messages from your leadership and executive teams.
• Blog channels for more informal communications.
• Knowledge base libraries for SOPs and step-by-step guidance.
• Policy management applications for company and regulatory policies.
• Project management spaces for task-related communications.
• Document management systems for collaborating on patient documents and medical notes.
• Instant or in-system messaging for quick, one-to-one communications.

For more sensitive communications, a face-to-face approach may be more appropriate. We’d recommend using an event management application, as well as intranet calendars, to organize meetings and town halls more efficiently.

4. Implement rigorous content publication and review cycles

Socializing your healthcare communications strategy is an ongoing process that requires structure and momentum.

This begins with assigning ownership. Identify key communicators and give them specific responsibilities — executives for strategic updates, compliance officers for regulatory training and policy distribution, line managers for team communications, and so on.

Then, map out an internal communications schedule. This should revolve around your strategic priorities while allowing room for more informal, culture-oriented communications in between. The goal isn’t to overwhelm your healthcare teams with messages, but to share valuable communications when necessary.

Finally, ensure your critical strategy documents are consistently up-to-date and reliable. Set review dates for SOPs and policies, and notify content owners when an update is required. The right digital workplace solution should automatically update document versioning, ensuring employees can only ever access the most current version.

5. Educate managers and team leaders

Strategy must stretch beyond written communications and long-form documents. It has to spread through your culture and people, too.

This requires the buy-in of your managers and team leaders. These are the people that interact with frontline teams, oversee operations, and provide direct guidance. As a result, they should be a cornerstone of your communications and socialization strategy. Remind them to bring up strategic messages, values, and updates in 1:1 meetings, and remind workers of any updated policies, SOPs, and processes when necessary.

6. Capture policy and SOP acknowledgement

Enforcement is a fundamental pillar of communications socialization. Particularly for critical documents such as policies and standard operating procedures.

To get concrete proof of acknowledgement, implement compulsory read-accept workflows that force employees to open strategic documents and tick a box stating that they’ve read, understood, and accepted its contents.

7. Ensure messages are understood with supporting resources

We can already guess what you’re thinking. “Employees may tick a box to confirm they’ve read a policy, but what’s to say they haven’t just given the document a cursory glance?”

You’d be right to question this. Acknowledgement does not automatically prove dissemination.

However, there are ways to ameliorate this challenge. Interactive AI chatbots are one such example. In Claromentis, these intelligent chatbots live within every policy and document. Employees can ask questions, receive accurate answers and simple summaries, and get directed to relevant passages of text. This helps to break down complex documents and improve comprehension.

E-learning courses, pathways, and training events can help to socialize your communications even further. Consider coordinating this training alongside your comms schedule and strategic priorities. For example, building and distributing courses surrounding HIPAA updates before a new framework goes into effect. Make sure you test and certify these courses for the sake of proving compliance and socialization.

8. Turn strategic guidance into standardized processes

If you want your communications to filter down into your daily operations, you need to give your healthcare workers as much hands-on support as possible. Don’t allow any room for deviation or non-compliance.

For instance, when changing your medicine management or patient enrollment practices, build standardized e-forms to ensure employees follow the same process every time. With every form fill, you’ll receive auditable proof of compliance. Complement these digital checklists and forms with automated workflows to streamline follow-up actions, such as handovers, approvals, and incident reports.

9. Build channels for regular feedback

Some communications may leave employees feeling confused. How exactly will a HIPAA update impact their daily responsibilities? How should they communicate medication shortages or supply chain issues to their patients? This confusion will only escalate in times of crisis. For instance, during a virus outbreak or natural disaster.

No matter how big or small their questions may be, they need a place to ask them.

We’d recommend implementing the following two-way comms channels:

• Forums for collaborative discussions, “ask me anything” sessions with experts, and topic-based conversations.
• FAQ sections in your knowledge base, where employees can ask questions to subject matter experts.
• Comment threads in news and blog posts, allowing for immediate reactions and questions.
• Periodic employee surveys — especially after big changes — that allow for more detailed feedback.

Monitor engagement and strategic alignment as you go

As you evolve your healthcare communications strategy and socialization efforts, don’t forget to monitor your progress.

Measure comms engagement using your digital workplace’s built-in analytics. This should reveal content views, user activity, likes, follows, comments, and channel subscriptions. You can then gauge the effectiveness of your strategy by analyzing policy acceptance rates, compliance scores, operational outcomes, training completions, and more qualitative insights — such as survey results, 1:1 notes, and patient feedback.

To ensure these insights are readily available, consolidate them in a single dashboard. This allows team leaders to monitor strategic alignment in real-time and make rapid, data-driven decisions.

Make your communications stick with Claromentis

Without socialization, your healthcare communications strategy will be as effective as yelling into a void and hoping someone might hear you.

It’s not enough to simply write and publish your documents and communications. You need them to be read, understood, and enacted.

This requires a robust strategy that’s supported by centralized, accessible, and secure technology. Not a patchwork of fragmented tools that overstretch and undermine each and every communication.

This is where Claromentis comes in. Our digital workplace — comprising intranet, e-learning, and automation capabilities — unifies your communications, enforces acceptance and understanding, and proves employee compliance. In just one hub, you can socialize every message and document, enable your workforce, and see tangible improvements.

Keen to see how it works in action? We’d be more than happy to show you a bespoke demo of Claromentis. Simply schedule a call with one of our experts and we’ll handle the rest.

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