QHN Improve Staff Communication In Hospital

Queens Health Network (QHN) is a major healthcare provider in the borough of Queens, New York.

Saleh Ghasemi is the Director QHN Technical Services, leading a team of 40 responsible for all the desktops, service desk and helpdesk, web-based applications and intranet across 5,500 users in two major hospitals and satellite clinics.

Ghasemi had been frustrated by the available hospital staff communication channels not being fit for conveying urgent IT notifications. Staff were most commonly using mass broadcast emails and the intranet.

Ghasemi explains that, “Emails became irrelevant to people. After a while they were not even reading them because they all sound the same and look the same.”

In common with many healthcare environments, the limitations of email were glaring. “We couldn’t really communicate with everybody in our organization because we still had a good population of people who did not have email accounts. And if they did have email, they did not have computers to access them in an emergency or even a regular basis.”

QHN needed an internal communication platform which delivered emergency and outage communications fast, reached staff with no email access and improved readership of messages by addressing the problem of email fatigue.

SnapComms messages are now preferred by Queens Health Network staff over emails. Ghasemi says that, “Especially the administration thinks it is an effective way of communicating with the rest of the population.”

Better management of hospital communications has been an area of strength for SnapComms. Ghasemi affirms that, “One of the major benefits of this system is real-time. You have a lot of control over when, who and how to send these messages to. That is one of the major benefits of this system that you cannot get via other conventional communication.”