The first time you perform a task, it takes longer and feels more complicated than the 20th or 50th time. The higher the stakes related to the task, the higher the stress. So imagine what it is like for those responsible for ensuring the University’s COVID-19 response runs smoothly and effectively.
Contact tracers felt that stress last year as they began using Salesforce Health Cloud for their work. Penn State IT User Success found an ingenious way to help reduce some of that stress of learning a new system – they created a training hub of essential processes they needed for their work. Bobby Zaepfel, organizational change consultant, built the hub of tutorials and videos addressing the particular parts of each process they needed to follow, such as entering test results and case escalations.
Access to the training hub is limited to specific individuals because of job duties and data that is collected.
“We were asking end-users to abandon the system they were using and use this new platform, which was completely unfamiliar to all of them,” said Zaepfel. “We needed a central location that people could come to and access what they needed and when they needed it, no matter the time of day or their location.”
The hub’s success in supplying just-in-time information has since become a model to support similar work.
Crystal Straw, a Salesforce Health Cloud organizational change management consultant, said the Salesforce platform is also used for vaccine accommodation requests and approvals, vaccine card uploads, storing test results, managing the weekly testing requirement, and more. Lessons learned from the contact tracing hub project helped her create similar training sites for those new projects.
“When we looked at the metrics for how often the first hub was accessed and how quickly staff were able to access what they needed, we knew this was something we wanted to replicate,” Straw said. “It has provided us a great framework to more easily onboard services by following this model.”
One of the most recent additions was the COVID-19 Call Center, which handles student, faculty, and staff calls about COVID-19 topics. Sara McConkey, Salesforce Health Cloud product owner, manager, and business systems analyst in Penn State IT Enterprise Systems & Services, said an external group previously provided customer support. The call center team was onboarded using similar resources to those already developed in the training hub.
Zaepfel is thrilled that the work that went into the first hub is still paying dividends.
“We were just trying to solve a problem and fill a need to go live rapidly,” he said. “Now it’s had all this longevity afterward.”