Question

A. Intermountain Healthcare is a very large organization with thousands of employees. List at least four methods it uses to communicate with employees. Why do you think this organization feels the need to use so many different methods to communicate?

B. In the video, Fritz Grohn says that communicating with patients as they are being released from the hospital is not always successful at first. Use this situation (a nurse discharging a patient from the hospital after a surgery or illness) to describe the communication model, and explain where the communication breaks down and why. How do Intermountain’s employees overcome this problem to successfully complete the communication process with patients?

Answer 1

Communication is a tool that can help employees in exceeding in their career and even an ineffective one even has the tendency to break one’s career. An effective communication helps employees to better at work and simultaneously be good with their co-workers. It even helps in building healthy relationships and helps in avoiding misunderstandings. Thus a meeting or a project that one works with becomes much more successful. Let us look at a few methods that Intermountain healthcare has incorporated and had constantly worked on so that it can communicate better with its workforce for the betterment of their hospitals and clinics and hence improving patient’s wellbeing and experience.

Listen- Everyone has experienced this at some point of time in their life that they are communicating with someone, and that person isn’t listening. It causes annoyance in the person communicating, and the person feels that he/she wasted both his/her time and energy. But at Intermountain healthcare employees and managers have both the tendency of listening and speaking efficiently. Performance of a person is much more effective if they feel they are well informed.

Standardizing besides reporting- Like many organizations providing healthcare facilities in the US, Intermountain healthcare has standardized the besides report. It has provided the organization for a better exchange of information and with it increases the patient’s safety, quality of care improved, employees are more accountable and hence the teamwork is strengthened.

Asynchronous communicates channel- The environment within the hospital is highly interrupted due to the use of various electronic devices such as pagers, telephone services, face-to-face interaction with colleagues or family members of patients. These interruptions causes suspension of active tasks to complete later and which may result in the important task being left incomplete or completely forgotten. But at Intermountain employees are provided with various Asynchronous channels such as the voice mail or the e-mail. This channel can help to cope with the current interruption caused by the pager or the telephonic system.

Due to the organization’s excessive workforce of more than 35,000 and around 22 hospitals and more than 200 clinics have made the organization use various modes of communication with the employees and in between employees. The organization deals with over 900,000 people and so to manage their day-to-day activities and to provide them the best healthcare that they need to live happily the Intermountain uses video conferencing, providing local representatives in remote regions, conducting regular committee meetings and regular connection between the hospital and the tertiary medical centre and much more.