Launching a Better Physician Communications Strategy

Jim Blazar, chief strategy officer, Hackensack Meridian Health

Hackensack Meridian Health needed a better way to communicate with its physicians. The Edison, New Jersey-based organization was like many health systems across the country, and relied on a combination of email, newsletters, electronic health records (EHR), and other methods to reach and engage its medical staff.

“We had multiple ways to communicate with our doctors,” says Jim Blazar, chief strategy officer for Hackensack Meridian Health. “Through newsletters, through the internet, through sending emails. There were lots of different ways to go, and most of them were not highly effective.”

Blazar and John Simpson, co-chief executive officer of Digital Health Strategies, recently described how Hackensack Meridian Health developed a new digital communications strategy that significantly improved physician engagement.

Blazar says that before the system launched its physician engagement initiative, it had several different forms of communication separate from the others. Among those systems were clinical communications, system communications, patient data, secure texting applications, on-call scheduling systems, and several electronic health records (EHR) systems.

So, he says, Hackensack Meridian Health embarked on a project to aggregate all its physician tools, resources, and information into a central location that would be accessible through a digital platform. The system started the project with three goals, Blazar explains. Those goals were:

• Increasing physician collaboration and referrals to help keep patients within the system to receive integrated delivery of care
• Improving physician engagement with its communications
• Achieving its first two goals in a way that would also save time for its physicians

Read the full story now and learn how the system achieved these goals:

How One New Jersey Health System Uses Digital Tools to Build Physician Engagement and Improve Communications

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