Michael Porter is a Principal at Perficient for Portal, Social, and Collaboration solutions. He leverages 13 years of experience with portal and content management projects to help clients understand and take advantage of the value provided by web technologies. He has supported many multi-million dollar portal implementations for some of the world’s largest companies. Michael supports Perficient’s sales and marketing organizations through the creation of industry-leading services that help clients understand their enterprise portal and has helped to position Perficient as one of the top providers of strategic portal solutions. He regularly speaks at industry and partner events on portal and social topics.
Check out his blog at: https://blogs.perficient.com/portals
Follow Mike on Twitter @PorterOnPortal
Tell me a little bit about the recent healthcare portal projects you’ve been working on.
There are actually quite a few of them:
- Kaiser Permanente receives over 5,000,000 hits per day on their KP.org site. We have been moving that site from a rough java framework to a portal framework. We’ve been with them since the inception, and the portal provides both payor and provider services. This includes 129 applications that they surface up on the portal as a result.
- Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota is a fantastic example of a company that wants to use social networking for their employees and those that they collaborate with, such as hospitals throughout Minnesota. They use tools like IBM Connections to do so.
- Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida is another recent project. Quite frankly, I believe they have the best member portal out there. In fact, they spoke at the opening keynote of IBM’s Web Experience conference as a result. When you think about what is happening in portal with patient driven engagement, they do a lot of things to enable their members by educating them on the alternatives available with regard to treatment. This helps a member understand where and when they will use healthcare and enables them to make better decisions.
- Premier healthcare alliance is also incorporating a portal for their member hospitals in a project that has been all about content and servicing reports in a personalized fashion. There has been a lot of discussion about how to allow member hospitals to collaborate using social tools available on portal to develop a socially driven community of hospital members. Premier has put a lot of time and effort into implementing this social portal. Ultimately, this portal will allow their member hospitals to find research relevant to them and to better collaborate with colleagues across many hospital systems. These collaboratives also use analytics to identify how to save lives and implement those findings across the care continuum.
- Our newest project is at a well known tertiary hospital on the east coast . They are currently focused on how to enable employees, doctors, researchers, and others that work with the hospital with an enterprise portal. We’ve been working to create a roadmap that identifies the technologies that are the best fit for their organization, which need to be both mobile and social in nature to drive true communication among colleagues.
What are the first steps a healthcare organizations should make when considering a portal project?
First and foremost, there are far too many people that come to us and say “we’re ready to do a portal” but they haven’t thought through the stakeholders that will be impacted by this project. The first step needs to be targeting the users and developing a roadmap by sitting down and talking to these people. You need to learn their pain points and what a portal can do to help. If you haven’t thought that through and spoken to people that are using this on a day to day basis, then you are only building a prototype that will have little use to those who will actually be using the tool. I think it’s a bit like building a house without blueprints.
What are the most common mistakes that are made in portal projects?
All too often we speak to people within a healthcare organization that are leading a portal project and they say “I know what is best for the doctor, the nurse, the patient”. If an organization rids themselves of this belief, then they will also rid themselves of \0xBE of the mistakes you can make in a portal project. We need to listen to those who will actually use the portal. There are many tools available to healthcare organizations. By conducting User Experience studies and gaining feedback to understand how people will use the tool, the healthcare organization will get better results.
Mistakes are not limited to user experience, however. Unfortunately, there are actually a lot of dumb mistakes people make, which prompted us to write “12 Things NOT to do on a Portal Project” (check it out under “White Papers” on our Portal Collaboration page). Let’s talk about one of my favorites: “Methodology for Methodology’s Sake”. There are far too many IT teams that think the waterfall approach to building out a portal project is best. However, this approach often invites analysis paralysis. It also invites end users to view IT as a dinosaur that can’t help the organization move fast enough. IT can move fast enough, they just need to use the right tools in order to do so. IT also needs to remember their reason for being. They need to be an enabler rather than a stumbling block.
How do enterprise portals make healthcare organizations more efficient?
On the ground at healthcare organizations they are talking about analytics, they are talking about meaningful use, they are talking about getting better ratings, they are talking about providing better experiences to engage patients and members. There are many things that an organization needs to do to be successful. The question is, do they create another project to deal with each issue or can they use a portal to surface up all of that content in a cohesive way that helps colleagues get their work done? Many leading healthcare organizations are turning to portal as a result.
Portals also help the management of a healthcare organization. People who manage healthcare organizations are constantly being asked to review and approve tasks, purchase orders, patient plans and other items across various projects and platforms. It’s easy for a task to get lost in the shuffle. A portal is the perfect place for management to get organized. Using portal an organization can create a universal task queue that aggregates all these tasks from many different systems. Users simply click, review, and move on. This saves a manager, doctor, nurse, or researcher from needing to click through 15 pages to get through another system and hope nothing falls through the cracks. That’s just one example of how a portal can aggregate content, transactions, and processes.
Portals also help colleagues within an organization find the experts and thought leaders they need to get work done. Let’s take a recent example of a doctor that needed to find someone with a certain specialization. Using the traditional tools of email and directories, which can be a poor way to capture knowledge, it took him 30 minutes to find the person he needed. Social networking and search capabilities built into portals have fantastic profiling capabilities that could have helped. This doctor could have found the person he needed in 5 seconds instead of 45 minutes. Colleagues can align and interact in ways they couldn’t before.
Stay tuned for the second part of this Ask the Experts coming soon. Have any questions you want us to consider? Enter them below.
