See How Banner Health Supports Employees Through Mobile Tech

See how Banner Health provides employee training, communication, and support through mobile technology

Engage by Cell’s Senior Mobile Solutions Consultant, Patty Ruland, recently interviewed Samantha Hickert, Banner Health’s Senior Consultant of Physician Experience and Development, to learn more about her experience using our mobile technology in a healthcare setting—especially during the coronavirus pandemic.

Why did Banner Health seek out mobile technology for employee training and support?‍

“Our physicians are working all hands on deck in the field. They're not sitting in front of a computer screen. So we're seeing that even when we have email communication going out from their direct leader, they're not opening it. So they asked my HR team, ‘What can you give us right now to help us stay connected with each other?’ The physicians needed resources to get through this pandemic.”

Why not just use the company website?‍

“With my organization, it’s pretty hard to get to the homepage from your phone. While we prefer people to have their laptop, a lot of our physicians just don't. So we wondered, ‘How do we give all of our staff, our 50,000 employees, one place to go from their mobile?’ When they're tired, they've been on 14 hour shifts with patients all day, they're sitting in the break room and they don't have their computer with them. Now they can just pull up the mobile website on their phone and be connected with any support that we're offering.”

What kinds of resources do you create for physicians?‍

“We had physicians sign up for our webinar series through the Engage by Cell mobile website. We can host the webinar, put all of our PDFs there and all of our video recordings on the site. We connected everything—both internal and external resources on it, so this is a one stop shop. To advertise it to our organization, we instructed people to text a certain keyword to 56512 and bookmark the link on their phone. We also handed a little postcard out with lunches that we gave to nurses and doctors. The postcard basically said ‘text this number and you'll be connected with any kind of support that we're offering’.”

How do you use text messaging with your physicians?‍

“What was cool is once they subscribed to the mobile website by texting that number, we were able to push out text messages with real life stories. We would text something like, ‘Hey Banner Healthcare Heroes, keep it up! So far we've saved 200 lives during this pandemic, and it's because of you!’ We were able to push out nice quotes too.”

How do you use mobile technology for provider onboarding?‍

“We use our mobile website for all provider onboarding. Any new physician or advanced practice provider that joins our Banner Health system uses the Engage by Cell mobile website for the whole thing. We send out a QR code that they scan, or they text 'BH Onboarding' to a certain number and then they're connected with this right on their phones. We ask them to bookmark it, and they just think that they're on a normal onboarding app.”

What do you like about the mobile technology platform?‍

“I just love Engage by Cell. It's so flexible, you can use it for so many things. It really breaks down some of the barriers that we're seeing in our organization with connecting our people. We actually had some complaints from our organization like ‘You guys are making me download too many apps,’ so with this platform, they don't have to go to an app store to download it. They can just scan that QR code super quick.”