The challenge
There are unprecedented levels of collaborative working, programme management and project co-ordination taking place across the NHS. Group collaboration and information sharing is an everyday requirement for the following internal functions:
- Transformation
- Service Re-design
- Service Delivery
- Research
- Education
- Boards & Committees
- Bid Management
- Multi Agency work streams
Teams that fulfil these roles are often faced with a number of barriers that make the process of sharing information and working together, harder and more time consuming than it needs to be.
Common barriers to collaborative working
There are a variety of contributing factors that make efficient collaboration a challenge for NHS groups, such as:
- Firewalls
- Security
- Information Governance
- External Partnerships
- Shift Working
- Complex tools like SharePoint
- Email overload
- Document Versioning chaos
Glasscubes overcomes these headaches by connecting everyone together in a secure online workspace that makes it easy to share files, manage projects and communicate with each other. We simplify the process and transform collaborative working for disperate NHS teams.
How can Glasscubes help?
Glasscubes provides teams with a strategic and efficient way to collaborate, by sharing and storing information in the cloud that's secure, accurate and accessible from anywhere.
User-friendly online workspaces
An online workspace is a secure online area that you invite people to join so that you can assign tasks, share files, collaborate and organise schedules. Divide work streams into secure workspaces and keep activities distinct and confidential, while ensuring that everyone has access to the right information.
Securely store and share files
Glasscubes is perfect if you want to create a central “go to” file repository for fast, simple and secure file sharing. Provide your team with secure access to their files but in a permission-based environment that's controlled by you.
Every file that’s uploaded to Glasscubes is automatically version controlled so that users can be confident that they have the latest and most accurate information that’s available to them.
Simple project coordination
Glasscubes gives you immediate insight to your team’s activity, their engagement and your project’s progression. Either at a high level by monitoring, reporting and analysing workload across multiple projects, or in detail by looking into an individual task’s audit trail. All in an online environment that’s transparent to the rest of the team.
No training required
It’s quick and easy to set up an online workspace with Glasscubes. There’s no need for an IT expert or any additional IT equipment. In fact, all you need is a web browser and an internet connection.
NHS workgroups typically contain members that don’t have the time or inclination to learn new systems. Workspaces can be set up in seconds and your team will find the user interface both intuitive and friendly to use. In addition to this, free telephone and online support is included for all users.
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A significant aspect of the decision to go with Glasscubes was the level of personal support offered. So often this vaporises as soon as the purchase is made, but not so with Glasscubes. Frequent 'how are you getting on' calls and friendly, professional support available when needed either by phone or their on line chat facility were given. |
| Tim Burns, Service Redesign Lead at NHS Wiltshire CCG |
Trusted Security
Glasscubes is compliant with the security and information governance guidelines that NHS teams are governed by when it comes to sharing confidential information. We are government approved and available to procure through the Digital Marketplace (G-Cloud).
We are accredited by UKAS with the ISO/IEC 27001 Information Security Management Systems certification. This accreditation demonstrates our commitment to the continual improvement of our security management systems.
Case Study
The National School of Healthcare Science relies on Glasscubes to help distributed teams work on documents together and collaborate around specialist topics.
About
As part of the Modernising Scientific Careers (MSC) programme, the National School of Healthcare Science (the School) was established in October 2011 to support the implementation and delivery of the new healthcare science education and training programmes.
The aim of the new educational programmes is to train staff that will be able to work at the highest level in healthcare, understanding and advising on the most recent advances in technology and innovations in patient care, and to have the flexibility and adaptability to work across patient pathways enabling efficient and high quality care.
The School is hosted by Health Education England (HEE) West Midlands. It safeguards the delivery of quality education and training for healthcare science nationally and liaise with all relevant organisations to ensure smooth transition, continued accountability and governance is maintained within the new national educational architecture.
They have established partnerships with Professional Bodies, Royal Colleges, Universities, national and regional education and commissioning leads, as well as NHS establishments delivering the new blended educational programme.
Business Challenge
To find an easier and more efficient way for people to co-create documents and collaborate around scientific topics across multiple distributed teams.
Stuart Sutherland Head of Information and Digital Systems explains, ‘We work with a lot of external associates in the co-creation of documents that are vital to the running of the many training programmes we manage – curriculum documents, assessments, policies, strategic plans. These are all people that are not employed by the organisation but whose work we facilitate and rely upon. With email the only ‘reliable’ tool that these groups had access to for collaboration and file sharing, we had the inevitable potentially chaotic and unproductive situation whereby document creation and group discussion were fragmented and disorganised across multiple email threads.’
Email makes life difficult for teams that regularly need to share files and collaborate around their content. There had to be a better way to work and the School went in search of finding it.
Being a Healthcare organisation linked to the NHS the School needed to find a reliable and secure solution and turned to the Digital Marketplace, the Government’s framework for procuring Cloud Services.
Sutherland went on to say, ‘we shortlisted a number of suppliers from the Digital Marketplace and then used a balanced scoring method to benchmark each of them against an internally agreed set of criteria. We eventually choose Glasscubes after a number of side by side trials because of a combination of price and quality. It handles document control really well, it doesn’t need any additional extensions to any software and it’s simple to use which has made our adoption of the platform high and well received.’
The Solution
The School has set up a number of secure online workspaces that the distributed team members get invited to and can access from anywhere on any device. Rather than sending information across email, the teams post their content directly onto the workspace.
Members of the workspace can then quickly get access to all the latest updates, tasks and files all contained in one central area. All the documents are version controlled and the latest copy displayed, so there is only ever ‘one version of the truth’ for the entire team to refer to. Glasscubes has a great alerting feature that enables team members to be notified of new updates by email that might be relevant to them.
‘The online workspaces contain of set of group working tools specifically designed to help teams collaborate around content and we have been able to introduce a more effective way for our distributed teams to work together. Glasscubes have been first rate to work with, they are responsive, helpful and really good listeners' said Sutherland.
