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.
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?
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 And 60% admit to suffering from a significant platform integration crisis, with manual processes, outdated systems, and fragmented tools negatively impacting comms socialization and operational efficiency.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
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.
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.