eHealth Articles & White Papers

Ensure Adoption of Your Hospital's Web Site: Create a Supportive Web Culture

Ben Dillon - Vice President & eHealth Evangelist

We often hear the cries of hospital website managers ..."We had a great idea for a new feature for our website, but haven't turned it on due to the pushback we received from...." If this sounds like a challenge you face in your own health system, chances are you need to develop a supportive Web culture.

The Web once lived in a vacuum that was separate and distinct from the rest of the organization. Today, websites are highly interactive and tightly tied to operations. This makes it much more important to involve your key stakeholders in the process to gain their buy-in.

By including key stakeholders, you create a Web culture that is more likely to adopt your online initiatives. If the stakeholders are involved in the development of the site or features and understand the value, they are more likely to support the rollout of the features and use them. If they are not involved, adoption can be difficult.

Creating a supportive executive Web culture

Building a successful executive Web culture will help you gain support of those stakeholders impacted by your efforts.

Begin by identifying the members of your Web team or governance committee. Make sure to create a team that will help you remove barriers from the process-from project approvals to budgeting to implementation. These members should also help you build buy-in and consensus for your strategy.

After you've established your key partners, follow these steps:

• Tie initiatives back to the mission and business plan of the organization or unit. Use the organization's strategic plan to prioritize opportunities for investment. This ensures that your initiatives are relevant to senior stakeholders and increases the likelihood that they will receive broad support.
• Educate key stakeholders. Build a relationship with your key stakeholders and make sure they understand the importance of your website. Help them understand why your initiatives are important to the organization. Basing your plans on the accepted priorities of the organization's strategic plan will help this cause.
• Build momentum and buy-in from key influencers. One way to do this is by identifying quick-hit opportunities to deliver value or through pilot projects that demonstrate the value that Web initiatives can deliver. Then find a way to showcase those successes to continually generate support.
• Get people using it! Implement ideas that will get people to use the tools you're deploying. For example, put the cafeteria menu on your Intranet to get employees accustomed to using the Intranet daily. Then when you add more substantive site features, they've already developed a habit of relying on the Intranet for useful information. Or, if it's an Internet site, consider options to integrate your offline marketing efforts with your Web initiatives to improve adoption among your patients and/or community.
• Measure what's important. Capture the impact of the Web solutions that you are implementing in terms of the goals that emerged in your strategic process. Demonstrating measurable success on one Web project will increase the likelihood of support for the next.
• Communicate, communicate, communicate. Creating an effective Web culture and increasing the organization's willingness to support important Web initiatives requires you to communicate regularly with the rest of the organization. Talk with other departments and key service lines regularly to understand their goals. Ensure they understand how they will benefit from your recommendations. Create a feedback loop so you hear first-hand how the newly-implemented features are impacting them.

Creating a supportive grassroots Web culture

Once you have a successful executive Web culture in place you will be better able to manage individual rollouts. An executive Web culture is crucial for securing funding and support. It also aids in generating grassroots support, which is also critical to a successful rollout.

Here are some tips for ensuring a successful rollout.

• Point out the shortcomings of the current system or process. Resistance to change is rooted in the comfort of the current situation, so you may have to create dissatisfaction with the status quo. Sometimes you must communicate the impending crisis or opportunities lost as a result of proceeding along the current path in order to allow real change to become possible.
• Paint a bright, new vision of the future. Dissatisfaction with the status quo is necessary, but not always sufficient. Showcase the improved outcome they can expect to help steer stakeholders down the recommended route.
• Provide a roadmap from here to there. The idea of the journey is often more unsettling than the destination. Make sure all stakeholders involved understand that you have thought carefully about the direction you recommend. It is important to communicate that the road may not be smooth and you might uncover some potholes; this way, participants don't get discouraged at the first challenging juncture.
• Solicit feedback proactively. You may not use everyone's ideas, but make sure they feel that they've been heard.
• Showcase executive sponsorship. The formal Web committee buys your plans a level of credibility in the eyes of many within the organization. Others will require more direct indications of support by sponsors and other respected peers early adopters of the system. This is often easier when you have physicians building support amongst your physicians, nurses amongst nurses, etc.

Establishing an effective Web team or governance committee helps immensely in getting new Web initiatives off of the ground, but you still have work to do.

It's important to make sure all team members understand the value of your website and feel a sense of ownership for the projects being delivered. They also must be involved in generating support.

Cultivating a supportive Web culture is a process that needs continued attention both at the executive and grassroots levels. Organizations able to achieve supportive cultures have more success with their Web initiatives.