Case Study

The "zum Heiligen Geist" Foundation Hospital enhances its meeting culture with MeetingBooster..

The company

The "zum Heiligen Geist" Foundation Hospital is a non-denominational foundation in Frankfurt am Main. It is affiliated to two hospitals (Krankenhaus Nordwest GmbH and Hospital zum Heiligen Geist GmbH), two care homes (Hohenwald and Kronthal), a nursing school, and, since November 1998, the service company Hospital Service & Catering GmbH and FÄZ Frankfurt GmbH, the largest operator of medical care centers in the Rhine-Main area. The entire organization employs about 2,800 staff

The initial situation

In addition to monthly departmental meetings, each of the three teams in the IT department conducted its own weekly meetings. The minutes of these minutes were logged in forms created within the QM system.

Tasks were recorded in the minutes. Unresolved issues carried forward from previous meetings were reviewed, and their current status recorded in the minutes of the new meeting.

Participants did not receive an agenda in the run-up to a meeting.

What are the particular problems resulting from this process?

Basically, the meetings were too time-consuming. The lack of background information on the tasks being reviewed meant that the same problems were discussed again and again. Meetings usually ended up lasting between 1 to 2 hours, which is too long.

What were your criteria for evaluating MeetingBooster?

We wanted to replace the minutes logging procedure with a modern, innovative and above all time-saving tool. Our focus was to find an integrated and user-friendly platform, that everyone involved in the process would enjoy using and would benefit from.

Reimar Engelhardt, our IT manager, had already encountered MeetingBooster through his work in the KH-IT Federal Association, and felt that it was well suited to the requirements of the IT department. We therefore decided to evaluate MeetingBooster over a six-month test period.

What were the objectives of the implementation?

Initially, we used MeetingBooster for our departmental meetings. It quickly became apparent that it allowed us to save a considerable amount of time. The agenda was sent to all the attendees in advance, including all the attachments needed in PDF format. The meetings were more structured. In addition, the minutes could be sent to the attendees immediately after the meeting because they were logged directly during the meeting, allowing everyone to follow the note-taking process.

With the introduction of MeetingBooster in two of the three above-mentioned teams, these meetings also became more efficient. In particular, the feature allowing the planned participants to add their comments and suggestions to the agenda proved useful. Questions and topic ideas, which previously had been exchanged by e-mail, could now be entered directly into the agenda, a more efficient process which also allowed everyone involved to have all the information centrally available.

To avoid introducing redundancies with our existing ticket system, we decided not to use MeetingBooster's task allocation feature.

Advantages

• Consolidation and streamlining of our meeting processes
• More efficient use of time for all involved
• Consistent, re-usable agenda structure
• Direct inclusion of attachments in the agenda and minutes, so that all the required documents become available in a single file, which can be distributed easily

Conclusion

Our expectations for the future of our meeting processes have been met by the introduction of MatchWare MeetingBooster, and we have already acquired further licenses. Our meetings are more efficient and collaboration between the parties has greatly improved.

We are also thinking of using the tool beyond the IT department. An internal presentation of the MeetingBooster solution met with great approval.