St. Mary's Hospital Optimizes Operations with New Extranet

Launched at the end of 2010, St. Mary’s Hospital Centre’s (SMHC) website has already garnered a significant amount of attention and positive feedback within the medical and research communities. Having improved its image and internal processes with HTC’s robust IgnitionWeb brand asset and content management system, SMHC identified another unique need for which IgnitionWeb would prove to be the optimal solution. The hospital’s administration needed an environment in which sensitive documents could efficiently and securely be made available only to the appropriate individuals.

With nearly a dozen board meetings per year, five to fifteen new documents to distribute per meeting, and potentially dozens of intended recipients, email was neither efficient nor appropriate. Issues of distribution, organization, presentation, tracking and technical considerations had to be addressed.

HTC extended SMHC’s scalable IgnitionWeb installation with two customized modules in order to provide the hospital’s board, vice presidents and committee members with a secure document delivery system in a user-friendly solution. Administrators were given the ability to create media categories, upload files, flag certain documents for specific audiences, and define the user types that specify the appropriate levels of access granted to any given user. Front-end users login directly from the SMHC site and are presented with a current document listing and archive from which they may download any document that is displayed for them by clicking on its hyperlink.

Setting up member profiles takes seconds, much like posting new documents. Once documents are posted, they are automatically available to the tiered network of SMHC members. Board members have access to all documents, similarly to vice presidents. However, documents may be flagged as “board-only” in which case VP’s are restricted from accessing these documents. Committee members may only access documents pertaining to their specific committees. The new IgnitionWeb modules are also seamlessly integrated with the platform’s mailing list management module which allows for the targeted distribution of a single email to a specific or all tiers of the portal’s members. Individual recipients may also be easily added or removed from a filtered mailing list.

Internal processes for disseminating documentation have greatly been simplified. The new extranet enables SMHC to save time, optimize communications, reduce costs and focus on the work that renders the hospital centre a world-class research and patient-care facility. Implementing such a solution demonstrates SMHC’s ongoing commitment to better-serving its diverse community.