Accreditation
A major, and also under appreciated, challenge for businesses is keeping staff fully trained and accredited within an organization.
A number of industries, including but not limited to Finance and Healthcare, need to keep their staff compliant with and/or up to date with the newest industry developments.
These accreditation requirements mean regular updates and trainings for everyone.
However, managing and tracking ongoing training at a company level is near impossible without a comprehensive digital solution.
Manually tracking everyone’s individual training requirements, upcoming task, milestones reached, and other key training components is simply information overload. If done manually, more likely than not, there will be things slipping between the cracks.
The solution
Fortunately, there is a better way. Many companies now work with accreditation management systems – essentially, a CMS. Often run like an online portal, it gives your organization a platform to hold all the necessary training and accreditation content as well as giving easy access to all your employees.
RCDSO’s e-Portfolio accreditation platform
Furthermore, a CMS also gives you the ability to assign training modules to particular individuals automatically at a custom or annual interval. This way each employee can keep their training up to date as well as track what they’ve done and what they still need to do.
Finally, using a CMS provides a robust audit trail, should you ever need one.
Fundraising
Organizational fundraising is an arena that has largely escaped full-scale digitalization. Beyond some limited inroads with online donations to charities as well as stock standard digital activity to drive donations, fundraising has remained fairly traditional.
The challenge, of course, is that potential donors increasingly expect a digital solution.
The solution
Fortunately, there are dozens of digital solutions available.
First, canvassing software. Canvassing software, whether to inform about an issue or to literally ask for money, has come a long way. Borrowing heavily from the world of field service, digital solutions now let the actual canvassers upload their data (or donations) directly to a cloud based system, where the data can be seen via easy-to-understand dashboards or exported into Excel.
The advantages of digital canvassing software over the older paper model are clear:
- Results, straight away
- More accurate results
- Better analysis potential
- Less work
- Simpler administration
Second, fundraising CRMs. If you conceptualize donors as leads and sales, implementing a CRM is a no-brainer. Solutions like those provided by non-profit giant
Blackbaud allow you to track, communicate, and collect from existing donors, as well as refill your funnel from various owned, paid, and earned spaces.
Plus, many CRMs will allow you to streamline the administration of collecting donations, allowing more money to be funnelled to the cause.
Healthcare
For years, healthcare has been an unfortunate thorn in every digital strategist’s paw.
The problem? There are so many potential efficiencies and problems that can be solved with digital solutions, and yet – solving even one is a tremendous challenge.
First, no other industry (perhaps with the exception of financial products) has more information about its users and its customers. There are substantial pools of data waiting to be deployed.
Second, healthcare is uniquely positioned to benefit from efficiencies. Since the cost of business is high for healthcare, even small optimizations go a long way. For example, if a procedure costs $2,000, and you can use data to work out more accurately who requires that procedure, and as a result you end up performing fewer treatments (while still ensuring patients receive proper care), that’s a potentially huge savings.
Third, making healthcare more efficient will literally save lives.
And fourth, there’s a significant demand for healthcare efficiencies as the cost of treatment increases, and the demand rises with more and more baby boomers getting older and retiring.
Solutions
The sheer volume of digital solutions in healthcare made available in the last decade is staggering, but we’re going to focus on just one: data and information integration.
Healthcare data is a tricky needle to thread. It needs to be absolutely secure, it needs to be extremely detailed, and it needs to be only accessible by certain staff members (i.e. doctors and nurses).
There have been various efforts around the world to address these problems, but perhaps the best example of success in this field is PatientSafe.
PatientSafe is a private company in the US that works to build software and secure systems for the transfer of medical notes.
An example of PatientSafe software
PatientSafe allows a doctor to record their notes on an iPad as they talk to a patient, make a diagnosis, and send off for the correct test or medicine – all in real time. Those requests are put through instantaneously.
This system:
- Vastly reduces the administration work involved
- Vastly reduces the possibility of errors
- Vastly improves the efficiency of the system as a whole
The result is that doctors have the information they need, when they need it, in a much more efficient way than ever before.
Wrap up
The potential efficiencies offered by digital solutions in nearly every aspect of a business are now just being understood. Whether through better understanding of data, better manipulation of data, and through simpler administration tasks, the opportunity to streamline business processes is staggering.
But these efficiencies are not always so easy to see. In healthcare, in certification processes, and in tracking and managing fundraising campaigns, there are many opportunities for digital solutions to help and, in some cases, fundamentally change how we do business.
