User Case Study
Purepage: the intranet solution at Bayshore Hospital, New Jersey.

While familiar objects may help to make hospital patients feel better, working with familiar programmes on their intranet has made the staff at Bayshore Community Health Services work better.

There can be few places where the ability to share accurate and up-to-date information is as important as in a hospital. At the same time it is also an environment, which requires strict confidentiality and the ability to carefully store and retrieve information.

Luz Alfonso of Bayshore Community Health Services fully realised the potential benefits of an intranet would have on the day to day running of a large hospital. But she had some very specific requirements for a very special organisation.

“In an effort to introduce an intranet solution for our institution we needed an easy way to convert Word and Excel documents into HTML” - Luz Alfonso

Situated in Holmdel, New Jersey on a 37 acre campus, Bayshore Community Hospital is a 225 bed, acute care hospital. It offers 24 hour emergency care, diagnostic services, laboratory, behavioural health counselling, cardiac, pulmonary and physical rehabilitation and transitional care.

Since it opened in 1972, the main hospital has expanded and evolved to become the hub of specialised healthcare services that reach out into the neighbouring areas of Monmouth and Middlesex. Serving a population of over 600 000, it has established nearly twenty medically related affiliates in close proximity to the hospital. These include diagnostic centres, physical rehabilitation, a physician network, behavioural health centre, fitness and wellness centre, nursing home and assisted living residence.

Given the size of Bayshore it was the simplicity of Purepage that appealed to Luz. In seeking an intranet solution for the hospital she was keen to ensure that any disruptions to routine were kept to a minimum. In an organisation where time is critical it was crucial that implementation of Purepage would take less than a day and not require any additional training for its users.

Purepage provides an easy way to convert word and Excel documents into HTML. Users work in familiar desktop applications and contributing a document is as simple as saving it.

“Purepage offered easy conversion. Our users only have to make sure that they save their content in a designated folder with the correct name” - Luz Alfonso

Ensuring that the information being viewed is up to date is vital in the hospital environment. Purepage allows for scheduled publication of sites, providing for maximum accuracy with minimum administration.

“Purepage offered the ability to schedule at specific times and inter-document linking” - Luz Alfonso

By utilising the familiar user interface of a web browser, accessing and searching for information was found to be both quick and simple. But as the document being accessed is not the original, its security is ensured.

“Purepage provides a valid solution to us for the conversion of documents without changing what our users were doing in Word and Excel” - Luz Alfonso

As it is standard HTML the hospital staff found they could search the content of the document portal with no additional downloads. Tags on updated or new content also helped to make searching for information more efficient.

Purepage has already begun to provide Bayshore with a return on its investment. Helping to eliminate the production and distribution costs of paper-based documents has certainly brought financial savings. Other benefits are perhaps more important but much more difficult to quantify. The patients may not always realise the role Purepage technology plays in their care and treatment but according to Luz Alfonso the speed with which accurate information can be regularly published and accessed throughout Bayshore has greatly assisted hospital staff in the provision of healthcare. Purepage has saved time, reduced costs and improved efficiency in an organisation where these factors can bring about enormous benefits to the community they serve.

“The value of patient care depends on the outcomes achieved and the resources used”
Mr. Thomas Goldman, FACHE
President, CEO
Bayshore Community Health Services