Ideas for Communications Improvement

Group Q

• Mark Bulson
• Bill Cerniuk
• Chris Compton
• Sharon Gilles
• Dennis Oh
• Kevin Troutner

Organizational Awareness

• Have a dynamic organization chart on the website with positions and names cross-indexed with active and recent projects or a subject matter list.

Project Awareness

• Include in the Quarterly all-staff meetings, presentations on active projects (those in development to obtain staff feedback and raise awareness), one from Connected Health and one from Telehealth. Maybe 10 minutes each of an overview with a link to more information.
• It would be interesting to see a resource that shows what facilities are using telehealth technology and mobile technology in practice, along with a local contact. That would give many of us the opportunity to engage facilities close to us and see what we deliver to the customer. It would allow us to visit them to see how technology is used, and give us the opportunity to involve nearby facilities in pilots. It might be very enlightening to see firsthand what telehealth is about and how we might work together to deliver new/improved services.
• Portal in connected care and search for keywords (meta tags?) to see what active projects or initiatives are taking place along with contact information by subject. We use Salesforce to track/update our projects but we don’t really add keywords for searching. Most information we can find is about completed projects.

Communications and Collaboration

Along with the capabilities for collaboration comes the need to have a organization of the effort. A person or group that acts as a communications mentor ensuring that the organic aspect of collaboration grouping and collaboration output is organized to the degree that it facilitates inclusion of the parties involved.

• Internal Communications - We need a "steward" of internal communications similar to the role that Alan Greilsheimer and team provide for external communications. The internal communications steward would facilitate the following:
1. Internal Program Communications (top --> down) from Execs to staff
2. Internal Program Development Communications (Telehealth, MHV, WMS, VA MIS, OIT PD, Contract Vendors)
3. Internal Development Partner Communications (IAM, ASD, OIS, VIERS, HDR, DAS, DoD, ESE, PD, etc)
4. Coordinate NSD, Help Desk, and ANR communications and groups.
5. Coordinate, manage and groom internal communications content using the collaborative tools described below.

Recommend a transparent collaboration environment be adopted by the team to foster communications in a way that opens the as much as possible to the widest audience. A system that is open and inclusive by default and requires effort to establish exclusivity.

• For example, eMail by it’s nature is a closed audience limited information exchange mechanism for internal communications. Currently we struggle with including the right people on email threads to be able to make progress while at the same time exclude others who would perceive the messages as noise.
• As a contrast, collaboration systems like Facebook or LinkedIn provide an information “stream” that collaborators can subscribe to or ignore, to join and remove themselves at will. Having information in a open flow that is available to all.
• Collaborative Environment (tools and culture)

  1. Facilitate a culture of change and collaboration - The concept is that nobody owns anything, everyone owns everything. When in doubt, change it!

  2. Foster the adoption and daily use of collaboration tools such as a program wiki -The wiki system is built to be as simple as possible and still provide valuable function. When in doubt, click. Every change can be backed out, you cannot hurt anything.