Collaborative Work in Healthcare: A Vital Challenge

For several years, the healthcare sector has been in crisis. Budget cuts, eliminated beds, understaffing… In this tense context, healthcare organisations must meet enormous material — but above all HUMAN — challenges. To do so, modern modes (and tools) of collaboration can play a pivotal role. The enterprise social network (ESN), in particular, can be a real asset for fostering collaborative work within healthcare organisations. Collaborative work and ESNs in healthcare: here is an overview of a sector undergoing profound transformation.

Healthcare organisations under pressure, facing major challenges

With more than 12.8 million patients hospitalised in 2022, France's 2,989 healthcare establishments have never been more in demand! Paradoxically, drastic budget cuts (€8 billion in savings made over 10 years in the hospital sector) have resulted in massive workforce reductions, significant bed eliminations (100,000 beds cut over 20 years) and the maintenance of ageing work tools. The result has been a profound disorganisation of services (particularly administrative ones).

In just a few years, the situation and working conditions of healthcare staff have deteriorated sharply (work overload, reduced rest periods, shift work, verbal and even physical abuse…). And everyone is affected: clinical staff as well as administrative staff (who account for 11%** of the workforce). And when one department catches a cold, the whole hospital gets sick.

That is why today, healthcare organisations must meet 3 major challenges:

• connecting staff: building bonds within teams and strengthening cohesion (at the level of a department or an entire organisation)
• facilitating information flow: streamlining the sharing and access of information to better organise service work and ensure optimal patient monitoring
• equipping collaboration: modernising collaboration tools is key to maintaining a good level of performance

To address these challenges, the "digital revolution" has given rise to innovative solutions, and the enterprise social network is the best of them. It is a secure internal social network secured, specific to a company or an organisation (a healthcare body, for example) and reserved for its employees. It enables them to connect with one another, streamlines information flow and facilitates collaborative work, whether healthcare staff are on the same site or working remotely.

Read also: Coronavirus: how technology helps local authorities manage the health crisis

Challenge #1: Bringing Teams Together and Strengthening Cohesion

Healthcare organisations bring together employees who work in offices and others in the field, which creates an additional collaborative challenge. Administrative staff, clinical staff, paramedics, socio-educational workers and general services (cleaning, maintenance…) all contribute to the organisation's mission. Coming from different professional cultures, all these employees need to be brought closer together to work better as a whole.

And when the context is difficult, it is well known that the teams that fare best are the most united ones — those with the strongest internal solidarity. This is why they need to know each other well, discuss and share ideas so they can both talk about the difficulties they face and think through solutions together, day by day. This is how a sense of belonging develops — the ultimate motivational driver in challenging times.

The enterprise social network (ESN), also known as an "internal social network", will therefore play a decisive role in:

• Bringing employees together, wherever they are, without distinction between head office/offices and the field (white collar vs. blue collar). With an ESN, unite all stakeholders in your organisation on a single platform.
• Better showcasing talent and expertise, by leveraging the many features of community management (publications, personalised home page…). The ESN allows you to animate your internal communication, convey your values and highlight the talent/expertise of your employees through the sharing of achievements and unifying initiatives.
• Encouraging collaborative exchanges by bringing your employees together in thematic groups and communities to encourage and streamline exchanges between them on a daily basis.

Admittedly, we sometimes think of social networks as being full of trivialities that waste time. But beyond these misuses, they offer undeniable added value with their ability to: create quality connections, bring people closer together, build trust between them, and thereby increase solidarity and cohesion. You only need to look at how these 'mainstream' social networks are used in difficult contexts (following a natural disaster or a terrorist attack) — to rally around each other, offer encouragement, support one another and exchange advice. Enterprise social networks have thus taken the best of mainstream social networks while adjusting usage to make them a unifying, human, energy-generating tool for the collective.

Our client Excellvet, a network of independent veterinary clinics, has experienced this unifying power first-hand. Nicolas Le Cleac'h, the group's Head of Communications, is convinced: "using an internal communication tool helps strengthen the sense of belonging to the network, but also facilitates the onboarding of new employees."

Read also: The 7 compelling arguments to convince your management to launch an ESN project

Challenge #2: Streamlining Information Flow

Within healthcare organisations, a large amount of information is exchanged every day, both verbally and in writing. But in a context where medical, paramedical and administrative staff are overwhelmed, some information is sometimes forgotten or lost. Being able to transmit information easily, facilitate access to it and stay informed is therefore a threefold challenge of significant proportions.

To address it, the enterprise social network will enable organisations to:

• Centralise and organise information by replacing email with secure exchanges, centralised and organised in groups/communities, ensuring the optimal sharing of this information and documents among member employees.
• Streamline information flow (internal communication and intra-organisation communication), developing cross-functionality and breaking down organisational silos. And through interactive features, encouraging individual voices, feedback (for example through polls) and collective intelligence.
• Simplify access to information via an "intelligent" search engine. This way, your teams can easily access documents and all accumulated knowledge — ideal when you constantly need to manage the arrival of new recruits! In their news feed, everyone sees the latest information shared in the groups they belong to.
• Make your internal communication more effective by leveraging the tool's editorial features. You can better highlight the information you want to relay to everyone, ensure it is seen, and even remind — in a single click — those who have not yet read it. With an enterprise social network, get all your employees "on the same page"!

Some might argue that sharing information, distributing documents or creating discussion groups could be done by email. True — but where the social network pulls ahead is that it prevents exchanged information from being scattered across personal email inboxes. Instead, it is concentrated in one single place, accessible to everyone at any time. No more wasted time searching for an attachment among thousands of emails!

Many of our clients in the healthcare sector have experienced these benefits first-hand. This is notably the case of SantéCité, a cooperative group of healthcare establishments, which successfully "eliminated email-based information exchanges" and centralised all information on a single channel: Talkspirit.

Challenge #3: Facilitating Collaborative Work, On-site or Remotely

In healthcare organisations, recruiting good profiles today is still difficult. The attractiveness of positions and organisations is therefore a key factor. To achieve this, it is necessary to focus on the employee experience — in other words, the satisfaction people have in coming to work for your organisation.

Here again, the internal social network can be decisive in facilitating collaborative work and improving well-being for employees in healthcare organisations. It will enable all teams to:

• Work better together (on-site or remotely): the ESN allows work to be organised and equipped for multi-person collaboration, with features that facilitate project management, document sharing and co-editing, collaborative monitoring and simplified real-time exchanges.
• Boost team performance: with the ESN, you can accelerate deliberations and decision-making day-to-day, relying on better-shared information and real-time collective exchanges via the discussion feed or video conferencing. Specific features also allow the automatic distribution of information for continuous synchronisation.
• Save time, for example through a chatbot that automatically and instantly answers employees' frequently asked questions, freeing you up for higher-value tasks.
• Improve the employee experience (as mentioned above) with an all-in-one platform that reduces the number of digital tools to use and makes life easier for employees. A genuine digital workplace focused on both performance and conviviality, it facilitates remote work and helps everyone achieve a better work-life balance.

With such a tool, organising and executing work — in the office as well as in the field — becomes easier. For example: on the administrative side, distributing case flows and moving projects forward; on the field side, exchanging information in real time (via the integrated chat or video conferencing).

These collaborative features are highly appreciated by our client SCPARE, an anaesthesia and intensive care practice located in the Grand Est region. Nicolas Rocq, Anaesthesiologist-Intensivist, reports using Talkspirit to brainstorm on complex cases, gather colleagues' opinions, make collective decisions and exchange with external partners. The result: "we barely receive any internal emails any more!" he says.

In conclusion

As you can see, the enterprise social network (ESN) is far more than a modernised intranet: it is an innovative digital solution that simultaneously connects people (it is a genuine internal social network), facilitates exchanges and communication (it replaces email) and offers features that save everyone a great deal of time, every day. As Collaboratif-Info recently wrote, "the ESN is the hub of collaboration in the company today." So, when are you going to bring more collaboration to healthcare?

Many organisations in the healthcare sector already trust us: SantéCité, Guyane Santé, Réseau Santé… So why not you? Request your demo now to discover how Talkspirit can revolutionise communication and collaborative work in the healthcare sector.

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Authors: Laure Marchal, Benoît Renoul