The Organization
Northeast Hospital Corporation, which includes Beverly Hospital, Addison Gilbert Hospital, the Beverly Hospital Hunt Center and BayRidge Hospital, is a full service community hospital organization providing quality, patient-centered care to Massachusetts’ North Shore residents. The hospitals boast a medical staff of more than 570 physicians and their service area includes 13 communities that lie just north of Boston.

The Challenge
Intranets play a critical role in facilitating company-wide communication and the exchange of valuable corporate information. From disseminating company memos and news to providing access to HR policies and procedures, the intranet offers a central communication point for the entire organization. But for Northeast Hospital Corporation, the lack of a true intranet presence made communicating with its more than 2,500 employees an onerous task. Reliance on email and conventional paper-based methods for distributing information was time consuming and expensive. In addition, information silos sometimes kept departments from collaborating and communicating with one another. “Deploying an intranet to transform the process for distributing information within the hospital system became a top priority, and implementing a content management solution (CMS) to achieve this goal was a necessary component,” said Grant Sanborn, Manager of Community and Public Affairs at Northeast Hospital Corporation.

The Solution
Northeast Hospital Corporation enlisted the help of Andera, a Rhode Island-based Internet technology consulting company, to provide assistance with the selection and implementation of a CMS. After researching and evaluating solutions, both organizations selected PaperThin’s CommonSpot™ Content Server. According to Sanborn, “We chose CommonSpot for many reasons – but mainly because it offers great flexibility in terms of customization, integration, and scalability, as well as ease of use and affordability.”

The new intranet site, built and managed in CommonSpot meets the needs of Northeast Hospital Corporation by: 

  • Improving information availability within the organization
  • Boosting operational efficiency and productivity
  • Providing a centralized repository for information to reside
  • Reducing manual paper processes
  • Cutting down on the number of corporate emails sent daily
  • Enabling non-technical users across more than 100 departments to easily update, manage and publish content

Several features of CommonSpot played a critical role in architecting and building the site to the specific requirements of Northeast Hospital Corporation. Centralized news and events calendars, designed and customized by Andera using CommonSpot’s out-of-the-box Custom Element have significantly cut down on the quantity of corporate email sent on a daily basis. The Custom Element provides organizations with a flexible way to define and build their own content objects to meet their specific needs for managing content such as news, events, or job postings. Pulling from a central repository, departmental calendars provide staff with access to work schedules, training, and certification opportunities and other pertinent information specific to their departments, while a global calendar keeps all employees informed of the latest corporate news and events.

CommonSpot’s Simple Forms module allows non-technical users to create HTML forms via a wizards-driven interface. This functionality enables Northeast Hospital Corporation to easily conduct online polls and surveys which reduces their dependency on paper, decreases print costs and eliminates the manual effort involved in transcribing data. In addition, the organization has seen a significant increase in survey response rates, evidenced by a recent annual Safety Test which gathered overwhelming feedback in a short period of time.

CommonSpot’s flexible architecture and extensive APIs provide for tight integration with Northeast Hospital Corporation’s, medical information system, Meditech. The combined solutions allow staff to quickly and easily search for and access time-sensitive information, policies and procedures directly on the intranet. According to Sanborn, “This is a huge time saver as staff only have to log into one application in order to retrieve information.”

The Return
The bottom line for this patient- and employee-centric healthcare system is enhanced company-wide communication and improved access to corporate information. The new corporate intranet offers a one stop resource for employees by providing access to important information such as news and events, benefits and payroll, courier schedules, nursing policies and procedures, and other useful information. Additional benefits include increased operational efficiency and substantial time savings.

Today, there are roughly 70 content contributors across various departments who are responsible for publishing and maintaining information on the site. “This number is expected to grow,” said Sanborn. “Initially, employees were leery of using a content management solution, but we have seen CommonSpot’s adoption soar as more users come to appreciate its simplicity, ease of use and speed. We are thrilled that the organization as a whole is embracing the new technology and that the intranet is viewed as a valuable resource that grows in importance everyday,” Sanborn further commented.


Customer Information

Site Type: Intranet