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As a growing conglomerate of healthcare support solutions companies, AH Holdings’ mission is to bring value to healthcare through innovative, cost-efficient offerings. This same philosophy guides its strategic business transformation, which includes leveraging cloud and social technologies to become a more agile enterprise.
A fast-growing and innovative company with a palette for new ideas, AH Holdings saw an opportunity to leverage social enterprise technology to improve collaboration across its organizations, an early step in its transformation. With a highly dispersed workforce serving hospitals across the country and internationally, it sought to enable better knowledge sharing among field associates and departments company-wide.
AH Holdings partnered with Model Metrics to ensure it got the most out of its deployment. After just two months of going live on Salesforce Chatter, AH Holdings’ transformation into a social and agile enterprise is gaining momentum. Sixty-six percent of employees are collaborating on the system and more than 112 groups have been created by associates’ initiative. AH Holdings can provide better service to hospitals and clinics through enhanced knowledge sharing among its workforce and is driving business efficiencies through better internal collaboration.
Using Social Enterprise Technology to Help Drive Costs Out of Healthcare
TriMedx, AH Holdings’ largest subsidiary, helps healthcare facilities provide the highest quality of care to their patients by providing health technology management services, including equipment repair, preventive maintenance, and data management. With approximately 500 associates, many of whom are embedded at hospitals as clinical engineers, hospital customers realize as much as ten to 20 percent savings on healthcare equipment management.
AH Holdings knew that TriMedx’s clinical engineers (and, consequently, their customers) had much to benefit from increased, real-time collaboration, as they are responsible for servicing all types of healthcare equipment. While they constantly encounter challenges that may be new to them, they can draw from the experience and expertise of their peers. Using listservs for knowledge sharing helped to solve problems quickly when troubleshooting equipment issues, but was somewhat cumbersome, hindering efficiency.
Already using Salesforce, Salesforce Chatter was a natural and cost-effective decision. What proved to be more challenging was deploying the technology to ensure the system would drive business value. After initially turning on Chatter and experiencing low adoption, AH Holdings decided to re-approach its enterprise-wide deployment with the help of Model Metrics’ Social Enterprise practice.
“Social enterprise technology fits our technology vision to focus on supporting how people work and not just the underlying systems,” said Jeff Dodson, vice president, Information Services at AH Holdings. “To deliver on our mission to bring value to healthcare, we need to be agile in everything we do from a services, technology and business process perspective. Model Metrics understood that and helped us to successfully deploy Chatter in a methodical way to directly impact our business.”
The Project
Model Metrics’ Social Enterprise Practice worked with AH Holdings to deploy Chatter successfully and ensure adoption.
● AH Holdings formed a project team consisting of representatives from departments that stood to benefit most from becoming super users of the system including marketing, corporate communications, strategic and corporate development, R&D, its Salesforce administrator and others.
● The project began with Model Metrics conducting a business process review where the potential users of the system and their use cases were identified. Together, they defined 10 groups around these use cases to launch with.
● Model Metrics advised AH Holdings on best practices to successfully deploy, including a communication plan, which proved critical for driving adoption, and on how to handle change management. It also set up the system, migrated users into the groups and trained AH Holdings’ administrator and IT help desk to provide support at launch and ongoing.
Results
AH Holdings’ Chatter launch is an early success in bringing the company closer to its agile enterprise vision. After just two months of going live, AH Holdings’ 10 pre-defined groups at launch has expanded to 112 groups inspired by associates.
● AH Holdings has learned that content drives adoption. Many of the groups were formed by clinical engineering to focus on issues that enable them to provide best-in-class service to hospitals, including best practices on servicing biomedical, imaging and laboratory equipment.
● Across the company, departments are benefiting from improved collaboration. A new customer onboarding group, in particular, has gained much efficiency in its complex process of understanding a new hospital customer’s installed base of equipment and determining how to operationalize it.
● Service delivery, customer care center and even hospitals have created their own groups where they can collaborate privately and choose what work to expose to others.
● A Garage Sales group encompassing more than 100 hospital sites helps find new homes for retired medical equipment.
● AH Holdings drives Chatter’s use across the organization by holding webinars featuring internal Chatter success case studies as inspiration to other associates.
“With Model Metrics’ help, not only have we been able to help associates collaborate and drive efficiency, but we’ve been able to capture the incredible amount of knowledge and expertise possessed by our associates to benefit customers,” continued Dodson. “Our organization flattened and opened up nearly overnight. The future only gets more exciting.”