NHS Part 3: NHS Orkney Board gets TeamPage and £28,000 Annual ROI

The Board of Directors at National Health Service's Orkney hospital use Traction® TeamPage and iPads to eliminate paper at board meetings. The move saves £28,000 per year in printing and related costs, and was covered by both The Guardian and BBC News. This use case follows a history of NHS Orkney innovation with TeamPage. They first used the platform to address a failing grade in a communications audit (See National Health Service Orkney (NHS Orkney) and expanded its reach to integrate their legacy directory with TeamPage profiles (see NHS integrates Intranet 1.0 with Enterprise 2.0 to get Social with TeamPage 4.0).

The National Health Service in the UK is one of the world's largest employers. TeamPage is deployed at several locations, including the Orkney hospital where it was deployed in response to a communications audit that came out poorly. It solved the communication problem at the time by allowing operational and clinical users to post communication and key resources such as policy documents and pages. It also allowed individuals to share "classifieds" such as announcing they have some extra concert tickets - these announcements formerly were sent to the whole organization. So, the platform satisfied critical communication and knowledge sharing, while also covering the incidental communications that were important for employees, but otherwise created a lot of noise in email traffic.

Until recently, Orkney printed significant amounts of paper for their Board of Directors before each board meeting. The process was expensive to the tune of £28,000 for printing and associated costs.

They moved to a "paper-light" process by moving the documents to a PDF format and sharing via a TeamPage space. The purchase of iPads made it easy for the board members to sync the documents, carry them around, and access them throughout a Board meeting without worry about battery life.

The Guardian quotes Chairman Scott as indicating: A 'spend to save' initiative was put into play using capital resources to purchase iPads and we removed printers from desks, cleared out our stores of printing material and instilled in board members the need for them to use technology and reject paper use."

Having seen success right off the bat, Chairman Scott talked about his intention to expand their digital efforts in an interview with BBC News: "In my view we need now to spread the initiative down through the organization." He added he believed NHS Orkney was the first public body in Scotland to follow such a "paper light" approach.

At A Web That Works - Social Tools and Programming at NHS, David Rendall expands on these stories with specifics on why iPads were chosen, where TeamPage plays a role, and other aspects of their network that come together to deliver this solution.