McGill University Health Centre
The McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) is a bilingual academic health network and one of the largest and most modern of its kind in North America. Its team is made up of 12,000 hospital staff; 1,356 physicians, dentists, pharmacists and fellows; 720 medical students; 1,700 researchers, research students, postdoc and fellows; 1,243 residents; and 1,500 volunteers.
MUHC wanted to increase engagement across all levels of the organization - which includes four hospital sites and multiple other medical centres. Its goal was to strengthen relationships between the organization and its employees, as well as improve communication across the organization. Driving the need for change, was a legacy intranet outpaced by current technology and user trends.
This client was attracted to Digital Echidna’s EchidNET social Intranet product for its out-of-the-box readiness and functionality designed for healthcare institutions, just as much as it was for its open-source code benefits including no licensing fees or vendor lock-in.
With that in mind, Digital Echidna did a deeper dive to learn more about the limitations of MUHC old platform, desires for the new, and identified unique traits and needs of this healthcare organization. From this, a technical plan to customize the EchidNET solution was set. Special attention was paid to the bilingual aspect of this organization and to the goal of improving search and discoverability of web and PDF content.
EchidNET does come with its own default theme which can be customized, but only to an extent. MUHC took it one step further to influence the design, and created its own wireframes and theming guide. The end result is an attractive and easy-to-use digital experience that belies powerful collaboration abilities. Personalized dashboard with activity streams, a light-weight document management system, social media integration, and workflow and governance management, all feed the employee experience and speed productivity. Several communication tools are embedded into the platform. Digital and other tech assets also live within the workspace.
Training, documentation, and socialization of messaging, were all introduced in a plan to help ease the transition from old system to new. Because of this, adoption of the new workspace has been tremendous and considered a great success.
