Moments of truth—and the relevance of your intranet

Take a long, hard look at this photo. This is the core business in Region Skåne, my organisation.

The patient in the bed (a small child) and this nurse, along with 27,999 additional healthcare staff, is the primary reason why Region Skåne exists. This photo embodies the organisational mission—to treat patients and to save lives.

This photo also illustrates the most important service encounter, or touchpoint, we have. Jan Carlzon, legendary CEO of Scandinavian Airlines Systems, wrote a book about this in the 80s, “Moments of Truth”.

By ”moment of truth” Jan Carlzon means the few seconds or minutes a customer contact may last, but that reflects the ”functionality” of the whole organization. A customer-driven company is one that recognize that its only true asset are satisfied customers.

Quote from The Agealist

While this patient will experience many days, perhaps months at the hospital, rather than seconds or minutes, we can still talk about this as the touchpoint; a long, continous touchpoint.

This is the reality our intranet must support!

With this insight you could actually make a table for making the right content choices:

Maximize	Minimize
Diagnosis documentation, supportive documents related to treatments	Things not directly related to treating patients
Manuals and end-user support for med tech equipment (just look at the picture!)
Operational info and warnings
Access to the healthcare business systems, especially the EHR system
Everyhing releated to medication
Lab results, X-ray results
Operational changes at my unit/ward
…

Sometimes end-users in our organisation speak about work as a kind of tunnel vision or a bubble, where the only important thing is the patient in the bed. I understand this. If I were totally responsible for the well-being of another, I would also focus in this way.

All this means that the intranet team needs to build the intranet as a business system for health efficiency. Yes, we have sections for “My employment”, “About our organisation”, and “Self service”. Those sections are used, and not unimportant. But the really important content is information about healthcare and how to administer it. When the intranet team gather that kind of content, the team helps saving lives—literally!

What is the “Moment of truth” in your organisation?

Does your intranet support it?