Technology, Service and Going Google

Communication and collaboration are incredibly important in service driven organizations, they are what drive service performance and allow individuals from across an organization to provide consistent, reliable, and remarkable service to customers. In the “digital age” it is an increasingly complex task to share, collaborate, and communicate across a variety of platforms, and to organize that communication so you can see what was said, to who, when, why, etc. We have struggled with this over the years, as most companies do…a lot of it boils down to efficiency of communication, by which I mean how can you simplify the way you communicate, or time it takes you to communicate so team members can get back to value added work, in our case helping patients and healthcare professionals with their problems.

Some of that is a better organized meeting; when meetings are organized and managed properly they are much shorter and more to the point and you focus on the follow-up that was required and follow-up action items that will be required, to get the job done in the way it should be done. There’s also email and having the ability to track previous conversations and memos to see who received them. Not too long ago I remember having conversations with people about changing something, a period of time goes by, nothing changes, you ask why, they say you never talked about that…who knows, maybe I just imagined it, but I’m pretty sure I remember it – email does away with all that and provides an archived history of communication in an organized, and searchable format.

Recently we have begun transitioning our entire team, at all locations, to the Google Apps Premier Edition products to help us with this process. What do we expect it to do for us?
- Better ability to schedule patient appointments for multiple clinicians, in multiple locations
- Better meeting scheduling ability
- More efficient work from off-site, home, etc.
- Better data management – find what you need, when you need it
It’s still about servicing patients and professional partners better; we’re not an IT organization, but we do take pride in being forward looking with our technology deployment. But technology only makes sense for us if it flows back into the core of our mission, providing the highest levels of service and care possible.

We looked for quite some time and we’re confident that “Going Google,” the term devised for organizations that make the switch, will allow us to provide more and better service, by keeping our team members organized, in synch, and able to respond to needs more efficiently. Hopefully it all comes together as planned and hopefully everyone embraces the changes and sees the wisdom in the technology they now have at their fingertips…time will tell!

A few other examples of technologies we have used to provide better service to our customers and professional partners;
- GPS on all vehicles; allows us to route our vehicles in real time to where they need to be, taking care of referral source needs very quickly
- Paperless Filing Systems; allows us to access all patient records from desktops, doing away with the waiting, searching, and finding we used to engage in to locate a patients record
- VOIP phone system; allows us “One Number for All Locations” capacity by tying together all systems and gives the ability to transfer calls to all locations immediately
- Online bill payment; gives customers the ability to pay their bill in a secure online environment, an easier and more preferred method of payment for a growing number of our customers

These are all great tools for our people to have and the time they save by using them appropriately, they can reinvest into the people we serve, patients, customers and professional referral partners. If technology companies can continue to find ways to enable service organizations to enhance their services, everyone will benefit!