Spectrum Health unifies three separate intranets into a collaborative entity

In 2013, Spectrum Health’s three intranets divided 23,000 employees rather than connected them. Clinicians, mainly the doctors and nurses who made up 80 percent of Spectrum Health’s employees, used one intranet. Administrators and medical insurance workers, the other 20 percent, each maintained their own intranets.

That setup changed in March 2015, when Spectrum Health introduced its new, unified intranet, InSite. InSite was built on four “pillars”: connection, communication (content), collaboration, and “Work Out Loud.” The new site has won Spectrum Health first place in the “Best Launch or Re-Launch” category of Ragan’s 2015 Intranet Awards.

Unlike many new intranets, which launch on a slipway of good intentions and fine phrases, InSite delivered measurable results:

• Connection: InSite helps employees get in touch with co-workers in other teams easier than ever before. Rich profiles and a powerful search tool turns colleagues/strangers into allies. 
• Collaboration: InSite exposes email chains as inefficient in getting consensus, feedback, and dialogue. It offers a single source for discussions and easy access to previous discussions, which streamlines decision-making. InSite now holds more than 2,200 collaborative pages, and employees add more than 200 new pages every month.
• Communication: InSite gives employees several tools to direct messages to specific audiences and many places to post information to unit colleagues or the whole hospital. InSite has 1,300 consistent content creators—and 3,000 participating users.
• Work Out Loud: InSite pushes a cultural shift to transparency and collaboration. It has opened up content creation: Everyone can create news, blogs, project sites, and workgroup pages. Employees create or upload more than 300 documents every day. More important, InSite records 1,100 revisions to documents daily.

One can easily believe the communicators at Spectrum Health who say, “The real results aren’t all in the numbers—they’re in the stories, the comments, the collaboration and the engagement across departments, job types and responsibilities … the new InSite has opened eyes and doors around our organization.”

Congratulations to Spectrum Health staffers Ian Botbyl, Josh Bundy, Kristen O’Hare, Don Shell, Sarah Brodhead, Ron Bussa, Nick Lemmon, Pete Rigney, Tim Mayo, Mike Meyers, Michele Bitoun, Carrie Manders, Nancy Tait, Nicole McConnell, Crystal January-Craft, Krischa Winright. Patrick O’Hare, Roger Jansen, Mike Kramer, and Reagan Marketing!