New search interface for Interior Health - policy and procedure documents, guidelines and protocols.

Published Jun 8, 2015

Interior Health contacted Andornot to discuss possible options for providing better access to their policy and procedure documents, guidelines and protocols. These were available in several locations and were indexed in separate PDF’s depending on service area. Maintenance of this system of indexes was becoming problematic and unsustainable. Interior Health needed an easy to use search interface for clinical staff to quickly find and link to the documents, whether they be on their SharePoint intranet, a vendor site or part of their subscription to Mosby’s Nursing Skills.

Interior Health already owned a copy of Inmagic DB/TextWorksand the library staff were familiar with it, so we created a new database to catalog these documents. The intranet search application pulls data from DB/TextWorks and is powered by our Andornot Discovery Interface (AnDI) to provide a faceted, discovery style interface geared to be as simple and uncluttered as possible. AnDI features spell checking with Did you mean functionality to catch common misspellings and typos, and staff have added some common acronyms to the records to ensure that documents can be found using nursing jargon.

We were able to extract data from multiple PDF’s and SharePoint lists to build the initial database and batch modified records to populate additional fields. As a result, searches can be refined by Interior Health site, practice area, agency responsible, format and keywords. We also note which source document or manual a specific guideline is part of. The relevance ranking of the search results was adjusted to ensure that Interior Health (IH) wide documents always appear first. This approach really helps IH staff quickly locate the policy or protocol they are seeking.

Behind the scenes, the database also tracks who developed a document, when it was endorsed, and review dates to allow library staff to better manage the administrative side. The search interface is hosted by Andornot with access restricted by IP Address to Interior Health staff.

Since the launch the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. Comments from nursing staff included:

WOW oh WOW. My brief interaction with the Clinical Care find-it has been an incredible experience so far. Congratulations!!!!
A thing of beauty doesn’t describe this work well enough. It is definitely the birth of an amazing solution. I had a look at it yesterday, and it is a very intuitive piece of work.
OMG! It IS a thing of beauty.

And from the person responsible for administering the system:

As far as managing workload the drudgery of adding links to 5 separate indexes x 3 alternate titles/keywords (so sometimes 15 entries for one link/document!!!!) has been almost eliminated. Now there is only “ONE” and it’s great!

This project is a good example of how library staff can assist other groups within an organization to better organize and improve access to their information and resources. Prior to the start of this project Interior Health had looked to develop a new system internally, however library staff were able to convince them to utilize their existing software and Andornot’s expertise and hosting service to create an efficient and easy to use new system.