We are proud to welcome the Society of Hospital Medicine (SHM) to our family of Personify Game Changers, which are clients who are using technology in innovative ways to better engage their members, further their mission and drive innovation in their industry. We recently sat down with Kim Russell, Data Operations Manager at SHM, to learn more about the challenges her organization faces and how they use technology to solve them.
The Society of Hospital Medicine is a membership organization dedicated to promoting exceptional care for hospitalized patients. SHM serves hospitalists, or members of care teams, that care for hospitalized patients and the organization currently has over 18,000 members. Hospitalists include physicians, hospital executives, physicians’ assistants, nurse practitioners and practice administrators. SHM has been using Personify’s technology to manage member information, grow engagement across chapters and improve member communication since 2017.
Creating A New Member Experience
One of the most notable areas of improvement after launching Personify360 is the online member experience. Previously, prospective members would have to call SHM to purchase a multi-year membership, often deterring people from membership altogether. With Personify360, hospitalists can do it all online- purchase a membership, update their account information and more. Allowing members this new level of self-service has paved the way for revenue growth and improved member satisfaction. Kim shared that, “Personify360 has been a real game changer in how we service our members and has given us a lot of opportunities we didn’t have before.”
Improving Data Integrity
According to Kim, Personify’s robust reporting tools and dashboards have allowed SHM to ramp up their data integrity efforts and improve visibility across their departments.
They use Personify’s reporting tools to easily pull and schedule a variety of reports. This ranges from having the latest registration numbers sent to the meeting planner every morning to real-time data integrity reports identifying potential data errors or duplicates.
Engaging Members Across 60 Chapters
Like many membership organizations, SHM struggled to engage their members and keep them engaged throughout the lifetime of their membership. With 18,000 members across 60 chapters, it can be a challenge to preserve that feeling of connection and belonging. After implementing Personify360 and Personify Community, they were able to come up with several solutions that they wouldn’t have been able to achieve before.
SHM now bundles special interest groups with certain membership types to improve long-term engagement. For example, if someone becomes a student member, they are automatically added to the relevant student member special interest groups, which also syncs with special interest groups within the online community. Upon joining, the new student member has direct and immediate access to the content, news and information most relevant to them.
Additionally, SHM encourages chapter leaders to use the various online communities to talk with their members (not just at them), share relevant information, encourage speaking proposals for the annual conference and more. “We are striving to make community the number one method of communication with our members,” explains Kim.
Perhaps one of the biggest member benefits to be found within SHM’s online community is the Open Members Forum, which is a private space available only to members to discuss a wide range of topics relevant to their day-to-day jobs or to the overall industry. Discussions topics range from Medicare cording to scheduling procedures and billing practices.
Optimizing Operations at Conferences and Events
In addition to managing their day-to-day business, SHM also uses Personify360 at conferences and industry events. The flexibility of the Personify SaaS interface makes it an ideal platform to facilitate onsite sales and quickly access member information.
This is particularly beneficial as SHM hosts a large annual conference with thousands of attendees each year and often need to access their database from a tablet device onsite to better serve their attendees. In fact, SHM’s annual conference “Hospital Medicine” is the largest national gathering of hospitalists in the United States and offers a broad program of educational and networking opportunities specifically for hospital medicine professionals and SHM members.
We were thrilled to learn about all that ways that the Society of Hospital Medicine is using technology to further their mission. We’ll let Kim tell you more herself about SHM and how they’re changing the game and driving digital transformation for their organization.