Intranet Journal
The online resource for intranet professionals

Intranet Dashboard a Lifesaver for Sentara Physicians

3/16/2007

(Editor's Note: Intranet Dashboard recently won two Intranet Journal Product of the Year awards, beating such names as Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Vialect IntraNet, HyperOffice, and Central Desktop. Intranet Dashboard was indeed popular in our reader-generated awards and is currently used in 46 countries by more than 500 clients. But it's still little known to many intranet users and developers. The following is a case study that provides insight into how Intranet Dashboard helped one company.)

Intranet Dashboard was introduced to U.S.-based healthcare provider Sentara to provide secure information and other business critical systems to their 10,000 physicians.

A sub-portal within the intranet is available to all 18,000 employees, delivering a wide range of tools to help them in their everyday activities. It has improved communication and information-sharing across the organization which comprises 87 different care-giving sites in Virginia and North Carolina.

Sentara Healthcare is one of the most progressive and integrated health care organizations in the United States, providing services to more than two million people. Its four web sites cover 18,000 employees, 360,000 health insurance members, 10,000 physicians, and millions of patients.

Sentara operates more than 87 care-giving sites, including 7 acute care hospitals with a total of 1,722 beds, 3 outpatient care campuses, 7 nursing centers, 3 assisted living centers, and more than 292 primary care and multi-specialty physicians.

More From Intranet Journal

Ten Leading Open Source Innovators Top Ten Tips for Improving Your Intranet IBM, Cisco Team Up on Chat, Video Platform If you want to comment on these or any other articles you see on Intranet Journal, we'd like to hear from you in our IT Management Forum. Thanks for reading. - Tom Dunlap, Managing Editor. FREE IT Management Newsletters bITa Planet CIO Update Intranet Journal Update Datamation IT Management Careers Datamation IT Management Update Grid Computing Planet HTML E-Security Planet Text E-Security Planet HTML DRM Watch HTML

The Challenge

In order to maintain their competitive advantage, the health care provider wanted to respond faster to changing critical information, to collaborate, and generally encourage more interaction between people within the organization spread over a number of locations. The physician portal was being under-utilized and management felt a simpler, more user-friendly solution was required. In line with other initiatives, Sentara was determined to become more aggressive in moving paper based communications, forms and process to the web.

Sentara needed a system that would:

Save them untimely and costly application development.

Provide a flexible platform that is both simple to use with a broad, holistic collection of business, collaboration and communication tools.

Deliver cost reductions in terms of infrastructure, communications and process management and provide access to other business critical applications within a seamless portal environment.

Provide multiple channels (sub-sites) to different areas of the organization as needed.

Enable staff and physicians to quickly search across all information.

Enable all areas of the organization to communicate with each other.

Provide secure areas for physicians to collaborate.

Intranet Dashboard was considered a good, versatile product and great value for money with an Enterprise License. It would save Sentara money in set up, development, and production time. The multiple tools available meant that IT did not have to spend months, if not years, in developing plug-ins or modules to satisfy their business requirements.

"Purchasing the product was very easy, user-friendly, and we had great support even though we are on the other side of the world," said Phil Lanzafame, Sentara's director of E-Business. "Our physicians are very demanding and really enjoy using (Intranet Dashboard)."

Of the 40 tools available to Sentara, highlights included:

Content Publisher -- ability to publish HTML simply from MS Word documents

Nav Editor -- accommodate a constantly expanding information structure with consistent and intuitive navigation

Document Manager -- an easy to use, integrated document repository

Forms Manager and Feedback Director -- convert hard copy forms to online forms

Acronym Manager -- manage medical and industry terms and definitions

FAQs -- create a database of Frequently Asked Questions and "How-to's"

News -- encourage communications between different areas of the organization. Re-user content

Forums -- facilitate discussion, knowledge sharing and communities of practice

Calendars -- share calendars within business units and teams

Quicklinks -- share mutually relevant resources amongst different user groups

In an implementation that took approximately two months to achieve, Intranet Dashboard delivered a consistent, flexible platform for both the staff intranet and physician portal. Sentara found it easy to install and provided them efficient infrastructure with a wide range of business and communication tools.

Sentara moved from a centralized to a decentralized content publishing structure giving them better control and improving "customer" satisfaction in the process. They were able to respond much more quickly to new business requirements by adding new channels, sub-sites and tools. The amount of people using the physician portal increased dramatically after installing iD.

For more information on Intranet Dashboard, visit www.intranetdashboard.com or contact a consultant on +61 3 9819 6333.

email this page

Tutorials XML Basics and Benefits Removing Spyware Build a PHP CMS Microsoft's SharePoint and more at: Intranet Journal's Tutorials

Intranet Journal Favorites Creating a PHP-Based Content Management System The Spyware Guide Introduction to Microsoft SharePoint Portal

Intranet Journal Part of the EarthWeb Network Managing Editor Intranet Journal Tom Dunlap EarthWeb Home Page Jupitermedia Home Page Media Kit