Name: Four Steps to Modernize Hospital Communication Across Every Shift and Every Unit
Uploaded: 2026-01-27T19:16:11.878Z
Duration: 1 h 1 min 24 s
Description: Four Steps to Modernize Hospital Communication Across Every Shift and Every Unit

Transcript for "Four Steps to Modernize Hospital Communication Across Every Shift and Every Unit": Hello, and welcome, everyone. I'm Mike Vilmec, and I'm thrilled to be your host for today's webinar. First off, I just wanna thank everyone for taking the time out of their busy schedules to to join us for what I believe is will be a eye opening conversation about hospital communication. We're here to to discuss something that affects every metric health care leaders care about from patient outcomes to nurse retention. And and that's how how effectively we communicate with our frontline care teams. So today, we're gonna be diving into FirstUp's twenty twenty six state of nursing communication report. What we found was both concerning but also actionable, and that's exactly what we're here today today to explore. So I'm fortunate to be joined by an exceptional panel of experts who live and breathe health care transformation every single day. So let's get to some intros. So first, we have Garrett Thomas, who's senior communications consultant at Indiana University Health. Garrett, do you wanna quickly introduce yourself? Yeah. Sure. So as I said, Garrett from Indiana Universe Health. I'm part of our corporate communications team and really have spent the last few years focusing on transformations like this strategy, building those relationships within our internal customers, that help us drive the use of technology, you know, like, first up. And just some some really great options for making the team member and the employee's experience better, but also making our jobs a little bit easier. So happy to be here. Awesome. Thanks, Garrett. Next, we have Ryan Malkz, head of AI advisory for HR transformation at Mercer. What a, what. a grand title I have for myself there. I might have made that one up. Good to see everybody. Yes. Ryan Malkus Mercer. You know, I've had the privilege for the last ten years or so helping health care systems redesign meaningful and exceptional employee experiences. Really passionate about how do we support our health care staff, our client facing or our patient facing individuals to ensure that they know what they need to do, understand and are committed to the mission and vision of the organization, and provide amazing patient care. But good to see everybody and happy to be here. Awesome. Thanks, Ryan. And finally, we've got Melissa Hensley, VP of health care sales here at FirstUp. Thanks so much, Mike. It is great to be here. I am thrilled. I'm Melissa Hensley. I'm part of our, our health care leadership team here at FirstUp. Relatively new to the organization, but not new to health care and experience management. With over twenty years of being in the experience management space, I am thrilled to be part part of our first up team, working with our health care clients to just take what that feedback is and actually put that into action to support our, our, frontline team. So thrilled to be here. Perfect. Thanks, everyone. And I'm Mike Vilomik. I'm from the marketing team here at FirstUp. So together, we're gonna unpack the data and share some real world insights. And most importantly, we're gonna try to give some practical steps you can take to modernize communication with your organization. So let's jump in and get started. But let me first let me just set the stage here. So we recently surveyed a thousand US hospital nurses, full time, part time, and travel nurses, and it was to understand how workplace communication is really working from their perspective. And what they told us was clear. When nurses miss critical communications, the impact shows up where her leaders feel it most, cost, compliance, and quality of care. And this isn't about nurses not caring or not paying attention. It's it's about a fundamental disconnect between how hospitals communicate, how they communicate with shift based mobile workers, and how they actually consume that information. So let me walk you through kinda what we found here. So first, let's let's acknowledge something important. Hospitals are trying. Communication volume is actually quite high. 70% of nurses receive workplace updates several times a week or more. 86% of hospitals rely on email as their primary channel, and, remarkably, 25% are still using paper notices, to alert staff. So so there's no shortage of effort here. Leaders are communicating. The problem is just it's just not working. Here's what nurses told us. 67% skim or delete messages without fully reading them, and 25% say they they do this quite often. One third don't have time during their shifts to read workplace updates at all, and nearly half, 48%, say the communications they receive are only somewhat relevant to their roles. Now think about that what that means. You can send all the emails you want, but if a nurse is moving between patient rooms, managing handoffs, responding to call lights, they're not sitting down to check their inbox. And when they do have a moment, they're faced with an overwhelming volume of messages where they can't distinguish what's critical from what's kinda routine. This is the communication gap. High volume, low relevance, wrong delivery method, and the consequences are are are quite significant. Let me share one of the most striking findings from our research. Ninety percent of nurses learn about critical policy changes after these policies have already taken effect. And nearly half, forty six percent, say this happens repeatedly at their hospital. Let that sink in for a moment. Nine out of 10 nurses are are being asked to comply with policies they didn't know existed until after they're already in place. Now this isn't just frustrating. It creates real risk. Ten percent of nurses told us that they're that they've completely missed HIPAA or compliance information. Sixteen percent have missed new or updated safety protocols, and and only forty eight percent feel even somewhat confident that communication is keeping them compliant. And while while missing a a compliance update can be costly, missing an update to a safety protocol, like changes to medication administration procedures or infection control measures can be a matter of life and death. So this isn't just theoretical. This is happening right now across hospitals, across the country. Now let's talk about the most important fact, patient care. So eighty one percent of nurses told us that they attribute patient care issues directly to organizational miscommunication. Not interpersonal issues between team members, not clinical handoff tools, organizational communication from leadership. What does it look like in practice? Thirty three percent cite inefficient handoffs or transitions of care. Thirty one percent report delays in patient care or treatment. Thirty percent note increased patient complaints or dissatisfaction. One nurse we surveyed said it perfectly. There's so much communication and too many overwhelming emails sent out that when something important goes out, it gets overlooked. Every time a critical message gets lost in noise, patients are put at risk. And then, of course, there's impact to retention because this communication problem doesn't just affect patient care. It's directly impacting the workforce. Thirty two percent of nurses have considered leaving their current department or unit due to miscommunications. Twenty one percent have considered leaving the nursing profession entirely, for the same reason. And the average cost to replace a single RN is, you know, somewhere north of 60 k. If you multiply that across a large health system, you're talking about millions of dollars in avoidable turnover driven in part by something as fundamental as communication. And then there's a human cost. Fifty one percent of nurses say miscommunication has increased their stress or burnout. Forty percent, it's hurt teamwork and collaboration, and thirteen percent feel entirely disengaged from their hospital. Miscommunication creates friction that compounds the already intense pressure nurses fee face every day when you don't have the information you need or or or to do your job safely or effectively. When you learn about policy changes after the fact, when you feel like your voice doesn't really matter, it it definitely takes a toll. For communication isn't just, an operational issue. It's it's a culture issue. It's it's a retention issue. It's a patient experience issue, and and it is it is something that is solvable, actually. So here's what it comes down to. When nurses miss critical communications, the impact shows up where, again, leaders feel it most, cost, compliance, and quality of care. And we've tried solving by solving this by sending more emails, posting more updates, holding more meetings, but volume really isn't the answer. The answer is reaching the right people with the right information at the right time in a way they actually work. So, amazing findings from the report here. Now what I wanna do is I wanna shift, from the research to the reality, what it takes to actually solve this. Because the truth is, these aren't just statistic. These are these are real daily challenges that health care communicate communicators are working, to overcome right now. And I'm excited to bring in someone who's, doing exactly that. So we have Garrett here who leads communication at Indiana University Health, one of the nation's, premier academic health systems, and, of course, a FirstUp customer. So I'm gonna pass it over to you, Garrett, to hear how you're addressing this, this ongoing challenge. Yeah. Absolutely. You know, happy to share what we've experienced so far and the challenges we've faced. I think anytime, you're talking about human experience, you know, that there's no one and done fix. Right? And we know that communication and user experience, those are connected. But, you know, a a user's experience is nonlinear. So you really have to take an iterative approach, and it takes a lot of teams, communicators, as well as other teams working together on these challenges. So, you know, we think about, what we face with those frontline workers. It's the same thing I think a lot of organizations of any size are facing. The example that gets thrown out a lot is that that analogy of, you know, it's like drinking from a firehouse. And I love that analogy because I think we can all visualize what being sprayed in the face with a firehouse feels like. And the first thing you do is you turn away and protect yourself. And that's exactly what our team members are doing when they get too much. Like you said, we're we're not it's not that we're not getting information out there. It's too much. And so they shut down. They turn away. They close that off. And it's really hard to rebuild those connections once somebody's like, yeah. Last time I paid attention here, it broke my brain. Overwhelming. Don't love it. I'm just gonna do this other thing. So that I think is the challenge that we face and and still face. It's gonna take a long time to fix it. But, you know, for us, if we if we dive into the specifics, it's, more about, you know, how many different subject matter experts and leaders are producing information and delivering it through a variety of channels. Right? It's not one fire hose. It's multiple fire hoses. And that will usually lead to gaps. Right? Because you don't have one strategy that is effective. You've got dozens of strategies that overlap massively in some cases and completely miss in other cases. And it's spreading out information over multiple things when it could have been packaged and bundled. So, you know, our frontline teams are asking us, for something that's pretty understandable. Right? Make this easier. So for us, we wanna make sure that we've got an eye towards collaboration and that employee's experience and, you know, how we can shift that burden from the employee to the subject matter experts. Because I can almost guarantee it'll be a much lighter lift from your subject matter expert teams than it will be for your employees. You don't want that burden to, like, collate and coordinate and figure out placed on someone whose job is not to collate, coordinate, and figure out this information. So, that's really what educated, you know, our strategic shift along with getting better data and access to platforms like FirstUp. So as we kinda dove in, the the big thing that we looked at doing is, I guess, three big things. Right? We focused on this idea of making it available and then making it known. Because we know human experience isn't linear. So if we design information that and not just design the dynamic content. Right? Like sending out that message. But the the background information architecture. So we can build structures where things are placed where even if they didn't get that email, they didn't get that newsletter, they weren't in the right huddle at the right time. We start building trusted sources that they know they can go to because that information is available. And then we look at the make it known, which is really when we get into our second concept of the who, what, when, and why. And that's in that order for a reason. Right? The who really needs to shift to be the first and foremost. We need to start thinking about our employees the way marketers think about us. Right? We need to understand our customers or our employees the same way a marketing team understands us as customers. And that's the same for our subject matter experts teams. Anytime one of your teams comes to you and says, hey. This needs to go to all. To me, that's a red flag. All is not a good answer when you say who does this need to go to. There is almost always going to be someone that needs to be targeted more than others, and so you start to get that stratification and that nuance. And then the last thing I kind of already touched on, technology and empowerment as a force multiplier. Right? We're able to make some of the wins you're seeing on these slides because we're empowering our team leads and our subject matter experts and these folks who are closer to the information to use the same technology we have so that we're not slowing the process down. And in doing that, can we also educate them on that user experience, on that team member experience, and we're giving them line of sight to something they might not have had before. So in, you know, looking at the results, like I said, we've seen, specifically in our physician and APP group, over the course of a a year dedicated to focusing just in the physician and APP space. You know, that's collaborating with physician and APP leaders. That's collaborating with the the key subject matter expert teams who are producing the information being thrown to these folks. We were able to increase adoption of use of the platform to where we're at about 80%. And that's that's a really good rate for us. Shifting the way we thought about newsletters to very narrowly focusing on making things much more useful for that group helped us increase our open rate numbers because we were thinking like the team member. Right? If I've only got thirty seconds to skim something, do I wanna filter through a bunch of noise? Or do I just need these are the things that are gonna affect my job today kind of information. So, as I think about, you know, what we've learned from this, that technology and data has 100% enabled us to start making these changes. And it's enabled us to also start teaching our subject matter experts about, you know, that that end experience for the team member in a way that we couldn't do before. And and it's also understanding that communications isn't a silo discipline. We we exist in an ecosystem, and we kind of spread throughout a lot of other areas. And a big part of the wins that we've experienced are because we spent weeks, months, even years sitting with those subject matter expert teams who have the information, learning what their pain points are, learning what they were asked to do, and then moving from a check the box mentality to a design of good experience mentality. So it's a lot of teaching on both sides so that we can help them do their jobs. Because, you know, communications is that last mile, all the miles before that impact how well that last mile is gonna go. Right? So. Thank you very much, Garrett. So yeah. So what we're gonna actually move to now is we're gonna do a quick sort of panel q and a with with those we have here. But just for anyone in the audience, if you have questions, either about, the report that we ran or anything that Garrett shared, please, enter it in the q and a box there. So we'll we'll we'll capture them all, and we'll collect them all near the end. And we'll we'll have some time reserved at the end to answer any questions from the audience as well. So feel free to just put your questions in that in that q and a bucket, and we'll address them at the end. But in the meantime, let's let's jump in here. So I've got some questions here for the panel to kinda spur some discussion on this topic. So, Ryan, we'll start with you. So you work with health organizations across the country. When you share findings like ninety percent of nurses learn about policy changes after they take effect, what's the typical reaction from leadership? And more importantly, what are the most common breakdowns you're seeing that that cause this? Yeah. And, this might turn into first up after dark here because I'll swear for just a second. But when when we we share those findings with leaders, it becomes an oh shit moment, an OSM. It's a real thing that we have in the professional space. And I think there's so many, kind of pun intended here, like benign communications where, oh, well, they missed that. We're changing the way breaks are happening or we're changing where to park during winter storm advisory stuff, which is still really valuable, very important things. Yeah. I've been trying to help organizations deploy these generative AI solutions and technology solutions. And what we're finding is nursing populations are using generative AI. A fair amount of them are, but very few of them even know if there's a policy at the hospital level within their health care system. So what does that mean? A nurse is in the ER. It's a Sunday night, so it's always crazy busy. Someone comes in. They're doing some triage. A translator isn't available. So what do they do? They say, oh gosh, I have ChatGPT on my phone. They take out their phone. They have a conversation with ChatGPT altruistically, right, in service of the patient care. And they're asking things like name, date of birth, how do you feel, what's going on. It feels, again, very benign. I'm just translating. But that's their personal device. Where does that data go? Is it saved in a chat? Did they just take all that PII home with them? Is that HIPAA information now that's sitting in their pocket? These are those things that executives are saying, oh gosh. Like, they didn't know that we had an internal tool. Those are the things that are opening up huge organizational risks. And so at the end of the day, what we're trying to really encourage is this thinking that communication does not equal communicating. Communication is viewing nurses as the recipients of things. We saw a paper notification, an inter hospital memo, an email, a post on the social board. That requires a recipient, and they have to want to participate. The participate, I think, is the keyword where communicating, the verb, is to weigh. And that's exactly what I think, Garrett, you highlighted. I just had a little stat here, and then I'll zip my lip for a moment. It was around the lab members. There was, like, 266%, like, increase in content, and a lot of it was user generated content. So they were participating in communicating with one another. And I just think that's that's really valuable. Some of the breakdowns is exactly what Garrett mentioned. It's self preservation. There's so much stuff that's coming at them. And so just like Garrett mentioned with the fire hose, they turn away. And the water doesn't even need to be on. They get an email, and it's a fire hose pointing at them. And so what do they do? They don't wait for the water. They just don't read it. They turn away. They delete it. And so a lot of it is that we haven't created a culture of communicating. We've only just created a a a culture of communications things. But, I know, Mike, you we probably have some follow-up questions. But and if this resonates with people in the audience, use that chat. You can see I'm pretty chatty. Miranda's pretty chatty in there too. Like, let us know if it like, yes. That's what we see or no. We don't. But, Mike, I'll flip it back to you. No. That's great, Ryan. Thank you. Garrett, it was it was awesome hearing what you're doing at, IU Health. You mentioned that, you shifted from providers need this to asking the kinda who, what, when, and why. What was happening before that shift? Why wasn't critical information reaching the right people at the right time? Yeah. So I I mean, I think it what I love about doing work in the space is nothing exists that doesn't touch everything else. So everything I'm getting ready to say ties right into what Ryan was just sharing, which is, you know, you've got teams trying to get the information to team members. You've got that fire hose effect. And so you really need to look at what is the way that we can kind of dial back the water pressure on that. And one of the ways you can do that is by making sure that you're focused on data and you're focused on the who so that you're still producing copious amounts of content, but it's not hitting anyone that it doesn't need to hit. Or even better, it's hitting them at the priority level it needs to hit them. Right? If they need it today, maybe that's an email. Maybe that's a push to leaders so they can put it in their huddles and their cascades. If it's a, hey. This is nice to know. You know, first step's great. They've got those priorities. I would suggest everybody adopt those priority levels and put some governance around them so that your subject matter experts team understand when they come to you and say, need to send this as an email. And you say, what's the priority? And they say, yeah. It's nice to know. You're not getting an email for a nice to know. Sorry. That's that's how we kinda control the pace of that water. So, you know, the your subject matter expert teams are subject matter expert teams because they're hyper focused on the task in front of them. They want to check that box that their leadership has given them. And so it's asking them to partner with us and collaborate with us to slow down and look at the team member experience first and use that as kind of the North Star for what you're doing because we don't want to check a box. We wanna solve a problem. And so if you're doing things to check boxes and get it out the door because you're overwhelmed in your work, that's a problem. Fix the problem at the source. Don't dump that on the team work. So asking who is really getting them to pause and think. You know, I mentioned if they start with the word all when you ask audience, probably not gonna be all. Right? And the reason is they're gonna have a different perspective and a mental model if we borrow from system thinking. Wanna get a shared mental model with all the people you're working with so that when they say something like all physicians, you understand the definition of all physicians, all nurses. To use nurses, great example for us. If someone came to me and said all nurses and I emailed all nurses, I might have half of our nurses confused as to why they're getting this because it's actually supposed to go to outpatient nurses only. The person who asked it for me only works in the outpatient space. So for them, all outpatient nurses are all nurses. And it's working with them to get that understanding to help them step up a few levels to say, that's not actually what all means. We have a lot of overlapping communities in our organization, and we have to be very clear about that who Because that's gonna dictate everything from then on out, how we deliver it to them, how it's messaged, how it's packaged, how it's presented. Because it's when things are you know, I know I saw some UGC questions in the chat. Part of the reason UGC is powerful and part of the reason we're getting those lab results is because it's by them for them. So they're speaking their language. They're talking about people they see. That makes it more relatable. So all of the who really starts to to narrow the focus of that fire hose, And that's all possible with data and technology and then having those collaborative conversations with everybody involved. Love it. Thanks, Garrett. Melissa, let's jump to you. So the the survey showed that nurses are are missing safety protocol updates. In. your experience working with health care organizations, how are some of the most sort of innovative organizations thinking about communication failures as an enterprise risk, not just, like, HR or mom's problem? Well and I think Garrett has kind of showed some of the glimpses into what some of these innovative health care organizations doing are doing today. It is not a department or internal communications type of communication these days. It is an enterprise wide. We're creating these governance structures now to basically have everybody all on the same page. And just as Garrett had just shared, making sure that you have those subject matter experts within the organization, to be able to understand who is this going to, what is the purpose of this, why are we doing this now, and all of those things. So it's not just, hey. Internal communications is going to be running this or HR. It's actually everyone, within the organization. And that then just trickles down completely then to what does that experience for that particular nurse look like. The other thing too that organizations are doing is taking those updates, the safety protocol updates, and not necessarily just saying, hey. We're gonna have this as an email metric. We're gonna actually track this like a clinical metric. So that way we're saying, who didn't receive this or acknowledge this? That's what we've been asking, you know, before, or we're asking that now, but instead of what went wrong. Right? So those missed updates are being escalated the same way that we would with this handoff, if that makes sense. So it's shifting that mind from just communication over into that risk and quality conversation. So not internal messaging. It is a much, much broader thing. Awesome. And then actually, I'm gonna I follow-up on that for Ryan. So where does this typically show up in the data when you're doing sort of a workforce assessment? Like, are executives seeing the connection between communication gaps and the metrics that they actually care about? For sure. Lack of engagement, lack of accountability, hard metrics like internal mobility, coming to find that the way in which our nursing populations find about opportunities in other areas of the hospital, they're going to LinkedIn or Indeed or job posting boards and have no clue because the way in which we're communicating internally to our nurses just gets lost in the shuffle. We're seeing things related to onboarding. Like, onboarding sucks. There's not enough information. We have content teams saying, but we have all of it. Well, having all of it and making sure that it's available at the right time in the right format for the right people is a completely different conversation. And so and we have a series of strikes happening across The US for a number of different reasons, but oftentimes, they are then looking for their union heads to have conversations with the business. That, by and large, ultimately, is what the strike is. Right? Like a miscommunication between two groups of people that need to be mediated. So communication really is at the heart of the relationship that we have with our nursing staffs, and it comes up in the metrics that are hard and fast from a people analytics team. You all probably experience it in some way, shape, or form. It is that somebody parks in the wrong parking spot and their car gets towed. It's all of those little things that pop up. Again, I just keep going back to this notion of, you know, why is this happening? And we have so many smart people on the call today, and all of you are asking good questions, and then the panel is just far smarter than I am. But, again, I think it comes back to this unlearning versus, like, the change management around deploying these new solutions. Yeah. Do do we need to teach and train people? We used to, but I think now to Garrett's point that, again, I this is just resonating with me with that fire hose. We have to teach people to not fear that fire hose. Everything that comes through now, there's a conditioned behavior to delete it. These solutions are amazing. We just have to build that trust again. But I know I'm going off the rails a little bit, Mike. You can keep me centered because I you can tell I tend to be chatty. But No. It's awesome. Love it. Lively panel. Next, I got another question for Garrett, actually. So in the report, one of the nurses, told us there's so much communication that when something important goes out, it it gets overlooked. Right? We can align that to the to the fire hose analogy for sure. So you tackle this head on with your newsletter consolidation work. I think you said you saw a 21 to 26% increase at open rates after consolidating physician communication. Can you just walk us through what you actually did? How did you reduce the noise without losing the important information? Yeah. I I can say we're in the middle of it. Right? We we started down a path, and it's gonna continue to grow because there's a lot of there's a lot of mechanisms and people and interactions, and it's never a simple solution. You know? The the goal is really about reducing friction wherever we can. And that's on the team member side, but it's also on the subject matter expert side. So we focus a lot, specifically with that relationship on or collaboration. Because collaboration is about relationships you can trust. Right? We need to meet, discuss, talk with these subject matter expert teams, these leaders, learn from them, understand what their pain points are. And then one of my favorite things to do is to ask them to say, hey. What are your what ifs? What if this was easier? What if this was faster? What if you didn't have to do this? What if the team member didn't ask you 75 times something you already communicated successfully? Those sort of things. And it gets people to open up a little bit and say, you know, maybe admit that what they're doing is checking a box and not as successful. And it allows you to start having those conversations where then you can start teaching. You've learned from them now and now you can teach. But I don't think I can undervalue just those those relationship building. Right? The work we're doing in nursing right now, we've got members of our team who if it wasn't for the relationships and the the trust and equity they're building with those folks, none of this works. It's all about those teams doing the legwork and starting to understand each other, at all levels. So one of the things that we did is we started building those relationships. And some some of them will be resistant at first because they've spent a long time and a lot of energy trying to solve a problem that maybe shouldn't have been there to solve in the first place. Right? Some somebody somewhere said you need to do x. And so we're all really good at solving problems. It's a little bit of a learned skill to look at something and say this might not be my problem to solve, and we might need to zoom out a little bit to see if anybody else has solved it or if me solving this is gonna cause some downstream impacts. And so you gotta untangle that. You're always gonna find at least one subject matter expert you can work with though that is super pumped about this, and you can start using that as an example of how this works well. So that's really what we did is we started looking at here's all the ways information is is bombarding this particular audience set. Here's all the the ways that they're doing it. They're sending it. And we started looking at things and asking, okay. Hey, team. How are you you're sending this email. How are you managing your Microsoft distribution list? And then it's usually a, oh, it's painful. Like, twice a month, we spend, like, four hours trying to figure out who goes on and who comes on. And then you say, if I can make that go away? And that's where you leverage your technology and say, I could build you an audience, and you'd have it immediately. And maybe it's you get them to give up their newsletter completely and just fold it into your strategy. Or maybe it's, let's just migrate your newsletter to something like FirstUp. Your audiences are taken care of. Your templates are now gonna look great no matter what platform they're on. You give them those wins. Right? You allow them to improve the product that they've been dedicated to. And then you take the next step and say, okay. What if you didn't do this at all? We'll just fold it in. You publish here to this topic, and then we'll build the newsletter at the end of the month. Automatically pull it in because we've had you tag an initiative that says this is important to this team. Right? And so you start to build the workflows that streamline. And it just over time makes things easier. But it it's it's 100% iterative. You know, in the physician space, we meet with physician leaders and, you know, physician experience design teams constantly to kinda check ourself and be like, hey. You know, this subject matter expert team said this announcement was super important to this group. Do you guys agree? Sometimes they say no, and it doesn't go in the newsletter. And then we have a conversation with that subject matter expert team to say, hey. You might not know your client as well as you think. Let's talk about that and say, is there a better way we can do this? So a lot of moving parts requires a lot of people just being dedicated to that North Star of the team member experience needs to be better. You know, the thing that I see a lot is that you we had some feedback once from a physician that said, you know, I was pretty free with my time. That has stuck with me for a couple of years now because I think that applies to most communications to any employees, not just physicians, to nurses, everything. We have to understand that we are borrowing these folks' time. Make sure it's worth it, and you're not just checking a box. That's really what I think we need to to narrow this down to. Because understanding there's different levels of attention. Right? You can put something in a place where it's available, and they can find it when they're ready for it, when they need it. And then there's that that front level attention where if you pay attention to nothing else, please pay attention to this because somebody's gonna get hurt if you don't. And it's really understanding that nuance and what you put where. I can I just add too? I think that it's so valuable what you were just talking about with, having a better understanding of all the different touch points at the employee level, not at the COE level. You know, at the COE level, we look north to south. We say, oh, we've only we're only gonna touch like, talk to the nurses three times this week. Well, there's 40 other north to south, you know, silos or COEs that are just saying it's only three times, and the fire hose is, you know, the summation of all of that. And so I kinda threw this in the chat. And, again, folks, feel free to use the chat. But, you know, the importance of looking at the experience, and I think you're you've been really passionate about this through the lens of the employee, is important. I looked at my email just because I was reflecting. I try to have it close so you all don't hear my Outlook things, but I was looking on my phone a minute ago. And I get a message from my leader. I get a message from my leader's leader. I get a message from another COE within Mercer around some great activities. I got a message from IT because I need to update my Mac. Shame on me. Need to do that. I got a message from my office manager because I'm in Minneapolis, there's a lot of stuff going on. I got a message from someone in my office around food that's leftover. You all get the gist. Right? That that was in seven minutes of each other. Where a communications team would say, well, no. We haven't sent anything except that annual reviews are happening in a month. Exactly. So there isn't a problem. And so I think, Garrett and do you have any other perspective on how do you, like, how do you tackle that? Because every function wants to they're saying, well, they're our employees too. You tell them that they're not. You know, there's a graphic that I use that is really like a a Venn diagram on steroids because there's no good way to help folks understand that these are all overlapping communities. And every community has a right to a certain part of the attention of that person that's a member of that community. But it is understanding exactly like what you were saying. You may get information about the same thing from three different people at three different times using three different mediums. And normally, you say that's great. More opportunities for them to see it. Unless all three are written differently. All three make them go, I don't know which to trust. You get one this week and then another in two weeks, and you go, wait. Is this the same thing they already talked to me about? So there's no collaboration. There's no coordination there. And I think that's really valuable. But, again, it goes back to the the teaching. Like, these groups can't see that because it's not part of their mental model. They see what they've been assigned to do. And unless a group like a group of communicators who does have sort of they they hop between silos pretty regularly. Right? So in our team meetings, we could talk to each other and be like, oh, let me talk to my client over here because what you just said is gonna impact them. And so you start bridging the gap and building relationships so that they can start talking to each other. And then you can kinda step out and be like, alright. You guys got this now. It's it's up to you. I did what I needed to do. And so now your communications will be more effective. So that's kind of some of the ways that we do it. It's just talk, teach, learn. Garrett, if you don't mind me jumping in sorry, Mike. I'm gonna kind of ask another. follow-up question. Talk a little bit about your governance structure. So your specific teams that you have out there that are helping support the communications and things like that that are going out to, let's say, your frontline nurses or even your physicians and APPs. How does that structure look? And I'm sure everyone is probably clamoring for that, especially in the health care of just understanding specifically what does that team look like and how do you you know, how does that governance work? Yeah. So it's multiple teams. You've got, like, the core team that I sit on that focuses on some of this more system stuff. But we have some really talented folks out in the regions that. have a depth of knowledge of that space that, like, we couldn't do anything without them because they're able to say, oh, by the way, are you seeing this echo chamber? This is happening here. Or this particular part may be more important to folks at this facility than it is at other facilities. And that's just with communications. Now you start bringing in our, like, nursing educators, our nursing leaders, our, you know, various teams and our service lines. And you really have to set up the governance and design it. Right? Think about it from start to finish. Don't just let it holistically happen. Go in and say, okay. What are your goals? What are you trying to accomplish? What's the team member need from you? And do that for everybody, and then build a system that hopefully works pretty well most of the time. You're never gonna get 100%. It is. impossible. Just not the way it works. But if you can start to narrow things down, consolidate them a little bit, that helps tremendously. And it's it's just always being ready to ask, wait. Why? What are we doing? Like, pause. Slow people down. You know, we tend to to break things up into, you know, you've got, like, project communications, and you tend to to devote a lot more time on a large project. And you do all the strategy and all the tactics, and then you've got routine stuff. And routine by nature, it should flow. Right? And so we start to enable our, like, nursing leaders and our physician leaders and our educators to publish directly to the platform. We set them up templates. We have those conversations and say, hey. This is this is a trust thing. I need you to not email 50,000 people today. If you need something like that, give us a shout. That's what we're here for. And when you've built that equity, you don't have to worry about that. Right? They will come to you because they're like, yeah. We want what you can offer. But you also don't wanna set make them wait a week for some, like, two sentences that just needs pushed out. like that. So give them those channels, teach them how to use it. And that's gonna that's that force multiplier. Right? Like, we can produce the lab example more content that's valuable Mhmm. by us not touching it. We're enablers instead of controllers. And I think that's a key element to it is teaching others how to do these sorts of things so that they can. I love that. I mean, Yeah. we we live in a world of democratized communication today. Right? And so I think if comms teams don't accept the fact that they're not the only ones that can create and send stuff, I think that the better the organization will be. And and that's kind of the movement, Garrett, that you've embraced too with all the the user generated content, knowing that that's just the way that communication and communicating is happening. And so I think that's kind of a call to action for everybody on the on the call today is just to be thinking through how do you move from, you know, this fiefdom of we we're the only ones that do this to where the consultants back to the business knowing that others will do it. Our goal is to be, you know, strategic, provide them with oversight, help them with governance, give them best practice, which is, kind of a philosophically different perspective than what comms teams, you know, I've been a part of in the past focused on. Yeah. Oh, looks like we might have lost Garrett. We might have lost Garrett. Might have been I I I offended him. I have that effect, on people. hopefully, I'll able to jump back. Hopefully, it's just a networking issue. There he is. Oh, there he is. Great. Garrett, I just had one one one, other question for you. It kinda got me thinking around. When you're trying to, create this kinda one cohesive nursing culture, but also not homogenizing an individual's nurse experience, that tension between consistency and also personalization is is exactly what the survey reveal that nurses are really struggling with. Could you talk us through, how you're approaching that kind of with knowledge hubs, self enrollment, the facility topics? How does that all actually work? Yeah. So, you know, I think it it's, again, tying back to you know, I you're right. I used the term homogenized experience because I like the word. But it's really that personalization. Right? It's the personalization that we come to expect in our day to day lives. Right? If you go to an online retailer. If you go to a streaming service, they know you. They know what you like. They know what to serve up. We've come to expect that in a in a very foundational way. But we don't necessarily get it from our employers because our employers don't collect data like those people do. Right? We've got a finite amount of data, but we do have enough to where we can start to create those spaces. I mentioned the inpatient and outpatient. The way we've set that up kind of on the ground that we're launching is we have a topic that's dedicated to inpatient. We have a topic that's dedicated to outpatient. Those subject matter expert teams that create content that's relevant to both, they push into both. Those that are specialized in outpatient or specialized in inpatient, they push into their areas. We build our audiences the same way. But those topics are also connected to, like, a SharePoint site in the background where you can say, here's the hub of all that deeper information. Right? It's not the, I just need a quick hit of information. It's the, I'm getting ready to go down a rabbit hole to try and find something very intentional. And we create those sections there as well. And then we start doing things like using our data to change. You know, if we have a welcome, our iteration of first step is called connect. So when a new team member comes on, we have a a journey that kicks off that says, hey. Welcome. Here's how you use this platform. The second email of that journey has a dynamic block in it that has different information whether you're a nurse or whether you're a physician. And I expect us to continue to grow in those personalizations. So now you're using to the example earlier instead of a bunch of people sending similar messages. You've got one message that's tailored. We do the same thing for, like, shortcuts on the homepage. If you follow a topic that you're interested in, you might get a shortcut automatically pop up in your main shortcuts menu. So that's allowing you to have that front door access to very quickly get to what you need. Because I think that's what, we all need to understand is our employees are not a captive audience. I think sometimes we forget and like, no, they have to pay attention. They don't. They can do their jobs and probably not watch, see, listen to a lot of what we provide them. And so we have to make things useful for them and quick for them. So we try to make it for nurses where you want access to your inpatient or outpatient topic. You open the connect app. You click your shortcut. You are there. That's the latest news. Here's some links to some deeper stuff. Right? So it's really about using whatever data you can pull from your IT teams and your HRIS systems to be able to customize in the same way we would in a consumer space. I I love that, Garrett. I I love hearing how you're using Journeys and audio audience block targeting together to drive that automated personalization at scale and then tying that back to what we see in the consumer world. It's yeah. Absolutely. Love love hearing that. Okay. Last question before we actually transition to the, the audience q and a. Again, if you're in the audience and you have a question, firing at q and a, we're gonna we're gonna go to that one right after this one here. But last one for you, Melissa. So, based on what Garrett just described and what you're seeing across the industry, what would you tell some like, a a chief nursing officer who's trying to build maybe a business case for this kind of transformation? What what typically resonates at an executive level to to to address and and bring to light some of these challenges? Yeah. Yeah. Having worked, if there are any, magnet designated hospitals here, I've worked a considerable amount from an RN satisfaction and patient experience, and nursing sensitive indicators. So when you're thinking about those types of situations and helping to get that magnet designation, for example, what's really important from a nursing perspective and chief nursing officer going to, leadership is really to make sure that, we're ensuring that our nurses are receiving. And the important part is not just receiving, but acting on critical safety updates. Right? It's not just gonna be that HR function anymore. It's going to be a core responsibility for our nursing leadership. And it is also gonna be then that key driver to patient safety and workforce trust. So being able to have applications like a First Step, are gonna be able to help nursing leadership enable and and build that workforce trust as well as that patient safety by getting those critical updates, not just so somebody can, see them, but actually act on them, and what does that look like. So, I'm really excited to partner with, with nurse leaders on, this important communication function and making sure that we're, we're hitting nursing, and making sure that they are, really engaged and and, being they're they are the, you know, frontline of that patient experience and making sure that they are there and getting the right stuff at the right time. So Awesome. Love it. Okay. Well, awesome job, panelists, but you're not done yet. We're gonna quickly transition to see if we can, answer some of the questions that we're getting in from the audience here. So I'm gonna jump in and start pulling some of these out. But by all means, if you're in the audience, you have more questions, just keep firing them in the q and a q and a box here. So the first couple questions are actually, very similar. They're talking about user generated content. So one of them was, could you speak to the user generated content that is driving engagement? And are you seeing user generated content from frontline staff, like lab staff? So I think most of those are probably positioned towards Garrett. We'd love to hear what you're what you're hearing on that at least on that. Yeah. So we've set that up in a way where we kind of create a sandbox for ourselves. Because our laboratory strategy is we have a open topic to anyone in the organization. And that's where lab they give it front of the house, back of house, like a restaurant. Right? That's that's the dining room. That's where they plate their served content. And it's out there. It's packaged. It's delivered in a way that's effective. And then you've got sort of the back of the house, back in the kitchen. And that's the private laboratory team topic. And that's the one where we say, user generated content. This is your guys' club. You know, use it as you need. And we are seeing those frontline workers. They're contributing that, hey. We had this awesome thing and check out this pitch in or I'd like to congratulate this team because they just did this awesome job. But we're also leveraging that for our leaders in that space to say, hey. Instead of sending an email to a questionable distribution list, post your project's update in that topic. And so then our team can come in and facilitate and either set up an automated digest. We do that for a lot of our topics where if you're a part of the topic, you know, every two weeks or every month, you get a roundup of x number of most recent posts. Or we could set up in, in our lab case, we've got a really talented communicator who goes in, starts their newsletter, filters to the topic, plugs it in. We can build them a really awesome newsletter in, you know, a half hour or less where it might have taken someone else two, three hours to try and collect all those stories and still not deliver such a good result. So that user generated content being put into that topic is super helpful. I'm guessing a follow-up question because I see it a lot with user generated content is what happens if they post what you don't want them to post? Treat them like an adult. And you talk to that person and say, hey. That maybe wasn't appropriate. We don't wanna limit everyone's ability for that communicating, like Ryan was saying, just because we're scared that a few people might not post what we want. Love that. Love that. So, yeah, we're getting more questions filing here. So, I think Tricia just had a comment. She said, agree. One of the benefits of FirstUp is that it enables content access. So, absolutely, yeah, you can push content out. But if someone wants to go search for content, after the fact, they can definitely do that. We also had a couple questions, again, on the same theme on mobile. Curious if Indiana is using the mobile app. And if yes, what's the adoption rate? And also wondering if Garrett sees nurses using mobile for comms. So another one for you, Garrett. Yeah. You know, I'll tackle the the second part of that question first. And it goes back to what Ryan said about unlearning being just as important as learning. They're not gonna just adopt it because you put it out there. They have to unlearn the the ways they have been doing things. So however many years someone's been in your organization, they've got this very probably complex nuanced way that they get information that they've built holistically over time. Like, oh, I gotta go to this website and then click here and then go to this. And then I'll see a file that this person uploads every two weeks and I'll sit through it. They can do that really, really quick. And so you come in and be like, hey. What if it's two clicks on an app? And they're like, no. No. I have my way. You have to unlearn that and give them the opportunity to come to it. So the second part of that is make sure what's on the app is valuable to them. Right? I I don't think, we always think about the fact that a frontline worker like a nurse or a physician, they have little small snippets of time. They need to not filter through unnecessary things in order to get to the necessary things. And it's not to say you don't want your feel good stories out there. You do. The feel good stories are the things we do when we're not trying to solve a crisis in our job. So I think it's you see increased usage based on your education or your relearning for people to have new habits and making sure when you do get them there, there's something that they wanna see. Love that. And I was just gonna yeah. Was just gonna add too. You know, and this is not kind of a shameless plug for FirstUp. Though I'm not a FirstUp employee, everybody, you can see I have the big Marsh M for Mercer and Marsh. But we have these digitally marginalized and communicationally marginalized populations within the nursing groups because when we send things out, we often send things out during normal banking business hours when the comms teams are in front of their computers. And it I I was just reflecting on I was doing a grocery order on Walmart yesterday, and I texted my wife when I was working, and it's kind of in reverse for for hospital system. But, you know, I I was working at, like, 01:00 in the morning because everybody was in in bed. And so what she wanted didn't get in there because she's like, well, when did you ask me? I go, well, I communicated that with you. Yeah. I communicated that with her when it was convenient for me. And so I think this is the back to, like, what FirstUp is helping with is ensuring that we are sending the right things to the right people at the right time, which is absolutely paramount. Garrett's point. They have small snippets of time. We can look at the behavior of when they feel like engaging with the business because they need to decompress between things too. We can find that, oh, they're looking at 03:00 in the morning. So if we sent something at 8AM the day before, did they see it? No. Because 40 other teams sent them something. And so I I think, again, it's just going back to the group to say, this isn't just a nine to five thing because your employees aren't just nine to five employees. And so, again, Garrett, it's kind of more just kudos to you. This is really difficult. I know it conceptually sounds simple, but for those of us that have gone through it, there's just a lot of things to consider. So well done. But, Mike, I can flip it back to you because I wonder if we have some more q and a things coming through. We do. Yeah. So we probably have time for at least one more here. And I gotta again, I gotta bucket them together because there some of them have themes here. So this one is on newsletters. So we've got a couple questions. Is Garrett using workflows or something else for the automated newsletters? And then how many newsletters are coming out of all of this content? Yeah. So technical question, mildly easier to answer than strategy questions. Yeah. So we are using workflows for some of them. So one of the examples I'll give is I mentioned that kind of two two pronged strategy for laboratory where we've got that front of the house out to the rest of the organization and the back of the house. So for the part that's out for everybody else, that content gets published in there. And we partner with, the people producing the content straight from lab, those subject matter experts. And they use specific templates and initiatives. So say they are publishing a laboratory update and it only affects pediatricians. They can tag it in a certain way so that when we build the newsletter that goes to all physicians, we just filter and say, oh, this needs to be pulled in. We pull it in. We can target it accordingly. And so now instead of three or four emails back and forth where we're trying to figure out who this is targeted to, They check something on the platform side, and we pull it in, streamlines the process for everybody. You can always ask questions and and get deeper if you need to, but routine stuff makes it easier. But the other thing we do is we say, hey. If you wanna follow that laboratory topic, you'll get a once a month digest using workflows that pulls the most we we tend to to evaluate and say, okay. They're publishing maybe 10 topics or 10 articles a month. So we'll send the most recent 10. And so that kind of allows you to self enroll. Right? It's the subscribe, unsubscribe content situation. And there are certain groups that we will force to follow a topic so they do get that digest because we know they need that information even if they don't know they need that information. And so that is one of the ways we do it is using workflows. The other way we do it, like I said, is tagging initiatives and and whatnot and building them way that I think we're all used to building them, which is going in, looking for the content, building it on a schedule, etcetera. Awesome. Well, I know I know we're coming up on time here. So we've covered a lot of ground today. I wanna put a big thanks out to our panelists. Garrett, amazing work. Thank you so much for taking the time to to share with the group. Thank you, Ryan and Melissa as well. Fantastic insights. Now just before we wrap, I wanna make you know make it known that there's some great resources that are gonna be made available to you. You'll be receiving a follow-up email with links to the full state of the nursing communication report. So all those stats that I covered in the beginning, there's a full report available where you can dive even deeper there. We'll also gonna include a case study from Nebraska Medicine. Fantastic story about another health care facility that they're using FirstUp, and they're they're automating the whole the entire first year onboarding experience for nurses and seeing a massive impact in reducing, first year turnover for nurses. So fantastic story there. That'll be in there as well. And then also our guide on data driven strategies to measure internal communication. So but, also, you don't you don't have to wait to for that email too. If you toggle over beside the q and a button, there's a there's a little thing that says docs. Those three resources are actually linked there right now, so you could actually download them right now if you'd like to. But, yeah, if you'd to continue the conversation or or explore how FirstUp can help your organization, help, you know, kinda modernize your frontline communications, please reach out to our team. We're happy to help. But, again, thanks again to everyone. Thanks again to our panelists and for everyone that joined today, and we look forward to staying connected with you. Thank you so much. Thanks, everybody.