About four years ago, Boston-based Partners developed Partners Pulse, a digital platform for productivity and communication, and opened a new administrative location in Summerville, Mass., to connect its 78,000 employees.
The health system used Partners Pulse to communicate systemwide initiatives with team members, but then when the pandemic hit, the demand for communications for remote work accelerated. There were several clinical guidelines and policies the system needed to centralize in a short period of time so that all hospitals and staff members could access them and receive the most updated information on COVID-19.
As a result, the health system had to scale up its ability to have more people accessing it during the pandemic, and Igloo Software, a digital workplace solutions provider, was able to assist with that.
"We have tens of thousands of front-line healthcare workers that needed access to Partners Pulse in this unprecedented environment, and we had more people than ever working remotely," said Rich Copp, Vice President of Communications at Partners. "It was already a digital destination for workplace tools and we built pages with different types of COVID-19 updates including HR policies, remote work toolkits and emotional well-being tools. Having Pulse gave us the opportunity to store all of that in one spot."
The system is intuitive to navigate and the health system continues to examine new ways to maximize the employee experience. "People want to be tethered to the workplace, and in this time the digital tools are an important way to achieve that," said Mr. Copp.