Last week our online community, HUB, turned one.
It's an exciting milestone, but perhaps more significant is that in it's first year HUB has shone a spotlight on a trend in healthcare that long preceded it: interorganizational sharing.
Healthcare is a community rife with information and willingness to support others, whether it's sharing tips to engage frontline users or tackling the growing problem of workplace violence.
While our online community is one space where this is happening, healthcare organizations have long collaborated in a myriad of ways and settings, from formal partnerships to sharing information at conference and events.
This approach has so many benefits:
- Access to new ideas and information
- Minimizing replication by learning from others' experiences
- Ability to collaborate on major issues affecting the industry by sharing knowledge and resources
- Boosts efficiency in the goal of creating the best healthcare possible
Here are the top three lessons we've learned about sharing in the healthcare community from those who share in ours:
No organization is an island
Implementing new ideas or tackling problems can be daunting, but approaching these problems with the support and advice of others can not only make it less intimidating, but can help you avoid roadblocks others have experienced.
"I have been very grateful to have a place I can go to research issues or scenarios I haven't come across before. The added benefit of having peers who experience similar issues has been invaluable. I've been able to locate, download, modify to fit my needs, and distribute vital education to our organization." - Jan Gezel-Wagner, Lawrence Memorial Hospital
It works for problems big and small
It might be a little easier to understand how organizations can benefit from interorganizational sharing during major changes, like the switch to a new electronic health record, but even small tasks can benefit from the insights of others.
"There is much I'm learning from HUB I didn't know. First it was an alert to help recognize duplicate files and now a way to add multiple users at one time. Both of these would be real time savers for us with over 2400 reports a month and over 900 (and growing) file managers." - Kelly Beauchamps, Lehigh Valley Health Network
The possibilities are endless
The variety and volume of issues that HUB users are willing to share information about never ceases to amaze. Just a few of the examples over the past year are:
- Revamping peer review processes
- Tips to becoming an HRO
- Implementing multiple RL modules at once
- Approaches to workplace violence reporting
- How to document behavioral health information
- Ways to gather user feedback and improve the reporting process
- How to implement a good catch program
If there's one thing HUB has taught us, it's that the possibilities for improvement and collaboration are endless.
Want to be part of the discussion? Sign up for HUB.
