I’m interested to hear what examples others are using to surface useful information on how to get the most out of clinical applications.
In most District Health Boards, clinicians will use a variety of applications, from the Orion Clinical Portal (“Concerto” or “Health Connect South”), to dictation apps, electronic reqest apps (for labs, x-rays, other referrals).
There’s often information available on these on how to get the most out of them, for example customising settings by the user, or “tips and tricks” that aren’t immediatley obvious by using it, but once you know about them, can improve the experience.
What is the best way to get this information to clinical staff other than waiting for them to phone the I.T. helpdesk when they get stuck?
Sometimes this information is in PDF documents, and others in sharepoint sites devoted to the applicaiton. I’m interested to hear what other DHBs have done to try and make this available to clinicians in a way that is easy for them to find when they need it.
An updated stream of IT tips & tricks under the “Hot & Latest News” banner.
Caveat: While the functionality exists, my experience suggests a very poor curation of articles making the offering less than effective. So the work needed is really someone (or ideally, a bot):
Maintaining this resource effectively i.e. producing/updating knowledge articles (of relevance).
Streaming this information to more than one place i.e. ADHB intranet
This is very much the domain of online forums and Wikis. Or maybe both in combination. What matters is that the task is widely disseminated and shared for everyone’s benefit in a searchable way. For an organisation, this would be internal of course.
If you want go and do something fancy in Excel, work out how to craft a diamond pickaxe in Minecraft, or even hack some code, what do we do?
Google it.
And where does Google take us? If what we want is mainstream, then usually a blog / website, etc. And often Wikipedia or Gamepedia, which don’t tend to go out of date like static websites (and hospital IT documentation).
If we want something a little more obscure, chances are you’ll land in an online forum where some others have discussed it and you find your answer. If you are exceptionally geeky, you might even sign up and ask a question yourself - and often get it answered.
In short
The task of keeping a knowledge base up to date is beyond the resources of most health IT departments. But an online community within the bounds of the organisation can do it effectively and cheaply if welcomed and enabled to do so.
This is an interesting question. As you say, much lies in PDF documents that are emailed out as needed, or posters that are displayed in locations of interest.
The Northern Regional Clinical Portal utilises a small “Tips & Tricks” graphic on the login page that is created by our IT clinicians to highlight a tip/trick that is of use to people. Because its a static and small graphic, the tip/trick does need to be able to be easily explained in a simple image.
@NathanK has absolutely nailed it here. We need to put knowledge resources on the wide open internet and go with it. PDFs, emails, and intranets all cause re-re-re-work of the same ‘tips and tricks’ locally.
(apologies for butting in to your CiLN conversation from the UK)
Thanks @parag
You make an important point that it’s not just about providing the functionality, but also making sure the content is maintained by being up to date and relevant. A solution needs to include resources for this and not just the digital functionality.
Wikis and online forums as pointed out by @NathanK can be part of this. It’s a matter of figuring out how to use these “crowd” resources combined with a supported and structured approach to get the right result.
@parag and others, do your healthAlliance or other solutions for this come with any data on how often they are used and accessed?
Yup - you can’t just dump in a forum (or other social media platform e.g. Yammer) in your intranet and expect it to do the job. You instead need to change the department / organisation’s approach to documentation in order to tap into the crowd in concert with the local IT experts. Put another way, the IT gurus need to be at the centre of the online community for it to work. And that takes investment, time, and good leadership to get there.
Online community management is a discreet IT discipline these days. And not many people in health have skills in it. But they can learn. We will shortly be spinning up a CiLN working group to advance and share our online community management; this would be an excellent opportunity to upskill in this area. Stay posted.
@parag and others, do your healthAlliance or other solutions for this come with any data on how often they are used and accessed?
Not to the end-user but I imagine it wouldn’t be hard to obtain from hA depending on the CMS being used. My expectation is web analytics should be regularly reviewed to support content refinement.