At HR Healthcare Boston, Karen Takacs, Platform Manager at MultiCare Health System, shared how the organization rebuilt its frontline digital experience into a reliable portal to critical knowledge.
Healthcare professionals need accurate information fast, with little time to search across systems or check whether what they find is current. Other conference speakers described the same challenge across multigenerational workforces and geographically dispersed sites.
MultiCare's experience suggests a useful test for any healthcare digital workplace: does it help employees complete the next task faster?
Key Takeaways:
For healthcare HR, internal communications, IT, and operations leaders, the intranet needs to be a reliable starting point that helps employees move quickly from a question to an action across roles, generations, and locations.
Five capabilities support that goal:
- Targeted communication
- Accurate workforce data
- Mobile access
- Clear governance
- Shared ownership
Disconnected and disengaged:
The economic cost of frontline friction
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1. Build a front door, not a publication
A healthcare intranet should work as a fast route to the tools and information that employees need, rather than becoming a growing archive of everything the organization has published.
Intranets often accumulate content faster than employees can navigate it. More publishing doesn't make essential information easier to find, or guarantee that what's found is still current.
MultiCare's earlier intranet had that problem. Employees couldn't always find current information in a useful format. The team redesigned the homepage around common employee tasks: finding a resource, making a decision, or moving into another system.
Frontline staff often have only a few minutes between responsibilities, so the next step must be clear.
MultiCare reported four early post-launch signals:
- 61% of surveyed employees said the new design helped them complete tasks faster.
- Searches for UKG, MultiCare's workforce management system, fell 20%, suggesting that more employees were reaching it directly.
- HR portal visits increased by 37%; IT portal visits increased by 28%.
- Use of the nursing and payroll sites increased by more than 50%.
Together, the figures indicate that employees are relying less on search and moving directly to key resources.
The practical lesson: map the employee's task, time constraint, and shortest route to completion. Use that journey to shape navigation, search, and the homepage.
2. Relevance beats reach
Sending every update to every employee is simple for the sender but costly for a healthcare audience. Important messages compete with irrelevant ones, and staff learn to either scan or ignore both.
Large health systems include clinical teams, corporate staff, specialists, acquired sites, and distinct operating units. Few messages carry the same urgency for every group. The problem grows as people move across facilities, teams, and specialties and as acquisitions introduce new systems and local practices.
MultiCare began targeting homepage content, email, pop-ups, and incident command pages to specific groups. For the May 2026 opening of the new MultiCare Mary Bridge Children's Hospital in Tacoma, the team sent operational updates to relevant employees rather than the full workforce. The new six-story, 82-bed facility tested the team’s targeted communication approach during a complex operational launch.
Targeting reduces unnecessary interruptions without restricting employees' access to information they still need to find.
The practical lesson: define the audience before choosing the channel. Identify who must act, who only needs awareness, when the message becomes relevant, and when it should expire.
3. Trust runs on data quality and governance
MultiCare identified data quality as the biggest challenge in its next phase. Incorrect role or location data sends employees irrelevant content and can hide information they need.
MultiCare operates 13 hospitals and more than 300 care locations across Washington, Idaho, and Oregon, supported by more than 20,000 team members. At that scale, consistent data and governance are enterprise-wide challenges.
Poor data makes personalization unreliable, even when the experience appears polished.
Fix it at the source: validate role and location data in the system of record before it reaches the intranet, not after. Intranets that integrate with an organization's HRIS continuously sync profile data as people move across roles and locations. This keeps data accurate and communication relevant.
Governance requires the same discipline. Without clear ownership, review cycles, and expiration rules, a streamlined launch can become cluttered within a year. MultiCare revisits governance as hospitals join the system.
The practical lesson: assign ownership of workforce profile data, name the authoritative system, document how role and location changes flow through, and set approval and expiration rules for critical content. Define where local teams can adapt enterprise standards.
4. Design mobile around frontline moments
For deskless and frontline healthcare workers, mobile access determines whether the digital workplace is usable at all.
Care teams move between patients, floors, and sites. Returning to a workstation for an administrative task adds avoidable delay. MultiCare has made mobile access and notifications for deskless employees a next-phase initiative. Takacs gave a simple example: an employee who remembers an HR task after a shift can complete it by phone in the parking lot instead of postponing it and interrupting their next shift.
Across thousands of employees, those saved steps add up.
Mobile design should prioritize the journeys employees use most: HR services, payroll, policies, real-time updates, and handoffs into operational workflows.
The practical lesson: rank mobile use cases by frequency, urgency, and operational impact. Start with tasks employees postpone, resources needed during or after a shift, and journeys with avoidable sign-ins or handoffs. Limit notifications to messages that require timely attention.
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5. Treat employee experience as a shared capability
Employee experience improves fastest when HR, Internal Communications, IT, and operations share ownership of it, rather than each managing their own piece.
Employee experience spans several functions: HR owns services, Internal Communications owns channels, IT owns platforms and data, and operational leaders understand frontline needs.
MultiCare recommends treating employee experience as a shared capability from the start. It was a running theme at the conference that healthcare organizations need to coordinate communication across generations and locations.
Shared ownership requires agreed outcomes, clear governance, and named accountability. Teams can then assess new capabilities against the same strategy.
The practical lesson: create a cross-functional group with authority to prioritize employee journeys, connect them to business and patient outcomes, assign ownership of content and data, and define success measures.
Measure behavior, not exposure
Email opens and page views show exposure, not whether employees completed a task faster.
MultiCare looks for faster access to critical resources, lower reliance on mass email, and traffic shifts toward essential services. A practical measurement checklist is:
- Did they reach the right destination?
- Did they finish the task faster?
- Did support tickets or HR queries drop?
- Did they rely less on broad communication?
- Did a recurring source of friction disappear?
Pair these behavioral measures with employee feedback for a well-rounded analysis.
Start with the moments that cost the most
Better frontline experiences remove avoidable work: searching across systems, filtering irrelevant updates, correcting poor personalization, or returning to a workstation for a simple task.
Start with the journeys that consume the most time or create the most uncertainty. Make the information current, the audience precise, and the next action easy to complete. That gives frontline employees more time and attention for patient care.
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