Updating Processes
Union Community Care is a nationally recognized healthcare service provider operating in the Lancaster and Lebanon area. Their recognition comes from their inclusive approach to providing treatment reflecting the people they serve. Most healthcare professionals aim to treat what ails a patient, Union Community Care attempts to also address the “causes of the cause” and the social dilemmas afflicting a person. They provide services tailored to each patient’s needs and culture through their inclusive Cares Teams. Each member of the Cares Team has their own cultural background and individual life experiences to bring to helping a patient seeking assistance.
Challenges
As with any major healthcare provider, reference material is stored online for employees to use on how to approach different scenarios for patients. This led to Union Community developing the Call Cloud, a SharePoint document library-based reference center for all the existing documentation. Documents were organized using a folder system nested many levels deep. Because of the complex nature of this filing system, documents were sometimes difficult to locate and most of the upload process was managed by a small group of users who managed the entire library.
Solutions
Hammer Dev, deploying a “mentored site development” approach, organized phone calls and online meetings with Union Community Care to understand more about the healthcare provider’s content. Using their existing system, SharePoint, the Hammer Dev team was able to train/demonstrate for Union Community new ways of organizing and presenting their information. Harmer Dev showed the team many alternative communication components available in SharePoint, including Articles, Pages, and Lists. Instead of searching and downloading a pdf document, the information would now be presented as a web page. A new Information Architecture was developed, leveraging metadata tagging of articles and documents, helping to organize eliminate the need for deep knowledge of the structure or hierarchy of the folders. Hammer Dev guided key subject matter experts in the development and deployment of articles and metatags, and configured features to alert staff when new information is available in the system.
Results
Today, the Union Community Care team enjoys easier navigation, easier access to content, and improved self-service. As an example, the CEO, Alisa Maria Jones, can communicate her thoughts and updates about the organization through basic article content published to SharePoint’s landing page. Hammer Dev helped to empower the staff who have been trained on how to effectively use the SharePoint tools. The result has been a more effective knowledge management process helping the team focus on helping their patients.
Not only did the Hammer Dev team help us to mitigate an immediate pain point, related to storing, organizing and easily finding critical documents, they also empowered our team to make use of SharePoint moving forward by “teaching us how to fish.” I consider this project to be a great success and recommend Hammer Dev’s services to anyone in need of help around Microsoft technologies, SharePoint and workflow optimization.”
Amy Carr, Chief Information Officer
