Hospitals face communication challenges on every front—from communicating with patients to a large number of employees and the community at large—all while facing compliance challenges. Hospital communications teams are tackling these challenges with RoboHead.
Read on to see how RoboHead turned three busy healthcare marketing teams into effective and efficient organizations. Children’s Mercy Hospital, Jefferson Health, and Loma Linda University Health are three of our busiest clients, with small, efficient marketing teams that field requests from thousands of requestors in their organizations.
In speaking to each of these teams, we found similarities that, with the assistance of RoboHead, made each team sing.
Clear Communication
One of the biggest across all three is eliminating “drive by” requests to keep their creative teams accountable and stakeholders informed. Firing off a quick email or stopping by someone’s desk sounds like an easy way to inform someone about a request, but like socks in the laundry, some of them will inevitably get lost. Someone forgets to write something down, and suddenly you have work that doesn’t get done and no paper trail to trace to find out why. When you route those requests through your intake form and enforce that throughout the project, everyone stays on the same page.
“Having the audit trail of the notes that go with jobs which we are utilizing so much in RoboHead—We ask everybody, don’t go to Teams chat, don’t go to anything else. Put the question in a note and @mention us,” said Dawn Chilson, project graphic designer and RoboHead administrator at Loma Linda University Health. “That has helped so much with our communication and basically keeping a log of communication for each job.”
Marketing project coordinator Grace Powell of Children’s Mercy Hospital told us that for her team, RoboHead acts as a single “source of truth” for their team. “Anything coming in, we know it’s not coming through email, it’s not coming through a team’s chat, it’s not through cubicle conversations. We know that anything is visible and coming through that RoboHead queue.” This was a crucial part of a process rework in response to a 46% year-over-year increase in requests.
Empowering People through the Request Form
Once your stakeholder is looking at your form, the form has to serve their needs—it has to empower them. Jefferson Health has 20,000 potential requesters, for example, and Children’s Mercy has over 8,000. Those are intimidating numbers for a small team, and the more questions a requester has, the more time that team is spending answering questions instead of doing work for those requesters. A clear and useful form is going to make sure those requesters can submit their requests with minimal need for back-and-forth questions.
For Jefferson Health, using conditional fields made all the difference. Your form might need to serve many different masters, and different teams have different needs. Conditional fields—fields that can be shown or hidden based on things like form selections and individual or group user permissions—make sure that a stakeholder from a given team is only seeing the form fields that matter to them, making for a more streamlined experience, even for teams as diverse as Finance, Physician Liaisons, and Community Engagement.
The Right Team at the Right Time
With organizations that can include thousands of potential requesters, delegation is crucial, too. Jefferson Health’s form also uses those conditional fields to help with that. When a certain client is selected, the right approver will receive an automatically generated email notifying them of the request. This keeps operations manager Lisa Unruh from having to route individual requests.
Children’s Mercy streamlined the way people interact with RoboHead in two different ways. First, Powell implemented a “circle of trust” model of management, with a small team of account admin and approvers, individual approvers, managers and directors, and finally requesters. This helps ensure that questions don’t go unanswered, and keeps Powell from being a performance bottleneck as the single RoboHead expert.
Second, Powell changed up how teams are trained on RoboHead. RoboHead serves requesters, project members, managers, and admin alike, but each of those roles will use RoboHead in different ways. By granting team members role-based visibility and training, they can focus on using RoboHead in the way that best suits their particular role on the team.
Jefferson Health has also found major efficiency gains through the use of pre-built project templates and staged reviews. Jefferson handled more than 4,000 requests in a year, and routed those through 55 different templates, each with pre-built processes for tasks and reviews, and pre-defined user roles for each task. Staged reviews—a part of those templates—helped to bring structure to the approval process for deliverables. By breaking reviews into stages, ensuring that each team’s work is ready before it moves on, rather than everyone trying to look at the review at once.
With the help of RoboHead, these health organizations handled huge numbers of requests with small but effective teams that Loma Linda University Health’s manager of design services, Jhanelle Zurbano calls “small but mighty” while also remaining scalable.
About the Author
Eric is the customer support specialist for RoboHead. In addition to being a friendly face behind our 24/7 support, he is also responsible for creating training and product materials. In his spare time, Eric enjoys cooking for his friends, writing, fixing computers, and gaming. He is also the owner of an orange cat.
