eHealth Articles & White Papers

Creating Success Begins by Defining Success

Ben Dillon - Vice President & eHealth Evangelist

Many eHealth professionals have trouble communicating the value of their online initiatives. Some people recognize this and are genuinely frustrated with their inability to tell their success stories to leadership in a compelling way. Others think they're delivering what their leadership wants and are surprised when their requests for more resources go unheeded or their budgets get cut.

What's happening? Here you are, working your tail off, and you're not being appreciated. Doesn't your boss care about what you're doing? Or, your CEO?

If you're challenged with communicating the value of your initiatives, it's important to ask yourself, "How am I measuring success?" Could it be you're measuring success by your own standards, and not those of your boss or the CEO?

Doing what matters

It is far easier to create activity than to accomplish tasks that matter- and it's a challenge to focus on the right tasks.

First and foremost, you need to determine what tasks are truly important to your organization, your immediate supervisors, and your senior leadership team. You need to ensure you are investing energy into initiatives that have the potential to create results ... and that your key stakeholders will regard as meaningful.

How do you accomplish this? Ideally, you would be directly involved in the planning discussions that set enterprise priorities or in the briefings your leadership makes to communicate their priorities to the organization. If you're not, however, then get your hands on the documentation that comes out of all of this planning.

Review your organization's annual report and strategic plan. Also review the business plans and marketing plans for your organization's key service lines and critical support functions (such as marketing, IT and physician relations).

These documents should provide you with your organization's key strategic initiatives and themes. And once you identify the themes, you can connect the goals for your online initiatives directly to your organization's strategic initiatives.

Prioritization will set you free!

It's not enough to pick the items that are most important, however. You also need to put your resources behind that effort. This seems obvious.

In reality, you might say your goal this month is to implement an online campaign to drive service line volume and you actually spend the majority of your time and energy putting out daily fires. This happens to all of us to some degree, but it's important to remember being busy and providing value are very different things.

Sometimes you have to say "no" to other people's requests. And that's difficult. That's why clearly prioritizing projects helps.

Prioritization is the process by which we say "yes" to some tasks in a way that allows us to say "no" to others. This requires prioritization rules that are well defined and easily understood. And most importantly, the rules must be supported by people in the organization with the power and influence to make the rules stick.

To best prioritize requests, focus on the requests that have:

• Support: Is the project in support of a strategic pillar initiative, strategic plan initiative, or specific business plan?
• Funding: Is the funding for the initial implementation of the initiative secured? Is there funding secured for the long-term sustainability of the project?
• Staff: Are the necessary staff or other resources available to see the project to completion?
• Implementation and long-term support: Is the organization able to respond to the initiative if it is successful? For example, if the goal of the project is to attract new patients, can the service handle additional patients?
• Sponsorship: Is there a valid executive sponsor?

This isn't to say you're going to be able to reject every request that comes across your desk. Yes, you still need to do some detail work to make sure that your Web presence is performing at the level that it should, but you also need to determine when you should do that work and where it falls in the list of priorities.

Are you the only one who can update that photo or phone number, or should that be done directly by the person making the request? Prioritizing requests will help ensure the majority of your time is spent on projects that matter to senior leadership and not on administrative issues.

Be your own best advocate

Remember, when you're working on the Web in healthcare, you generally step into the room without natural credibility. There's a lot of excitement around the Web and eHealth, but there are also a lot of executives in healthcare that don't believe in the Web's value.

Don't blame these people for their attitudes. Odds are no one has ever shown them that the Web has real business value - at least not in a way that matters to them. Find out what goals your executives have, what keeps them up at night, and then show them how the Web can help.

To learn about prioritization and telling your success stories to your senior leadership, watch our webinar, Create Powerful Allies: Stakeholder Management and the Web.