HosPortal will hold your hand during the onboarding process. In most cases our onboarding team will be working closely with you and be talking to you regularly. But our support does not stop when you go live. This page outlines some of our approaches and what you can expect.
'Pre-live' status
While you are onboarding your are in a 'pre-live' state that behaves a bit differently to what happens once you go live. This gives you some greater flexibility to making changes while you are learning the system and deciding among options.
Until you go live:
Only site administrators can access HosPortal. Your other users are not aware HosPortal is being set up in the background and do not receive emails, SMS messages or alerts.
It is not possible to give people the nuanced permissions that are available once you go live. As an example, after you are live you can set permissions so that someone can only manage certain rosters or only add certain staff. In pre-live the permissions are either 'everything' or 'nothing'
Until you go live, there is more flexibility on changing settings. Once you go live we make it harder to delete or amend certain settings.
We will work with you to decide when to go live. Once you go live all your users can be automatically invited to create their logins and any more detailed permissions become active. You cannot then go back to pre-live state.
Reference material and help files
You are already using some of our help files by reading this page!
A complete library of our help files is available at help.hosportal.com. This page is available even if you are not logged in to HosPortal.
HosPortal uses some specific terminology in our meetings and in our help files. If they sounds confusing you might want to look here.
Dealing with your onboarding team
Your onboarding team is the best placed to assist you in the early days in that they will come to deeply understand your needs and expectations. Please send them questions by email between meetings. They may be able to answer them quickly. If not, they will aim to cover them off at the next scheduled meeting.
Our answers to these sorts of questions might involve:
an email response, possibly with links to our help files or a recorded video
a suggestion to arrange a call or videoconference
a note to suggest we address the issues at the next meeting, especially if it needs some discussion.
Please note that our onboarding team is dealing with many customers at the same time so cannot always respond immediately. Although sometimes your questions are best answered by a phone call or video conference, this is not always possible to do that at short notice.
Software help
If your question is related just to HosPortal software and does not require deep understanding of your specific setup then you can use our usual help pages, accessed by clicking the 'smiley face' button at the bottom-right of each page after you log in.
This also gives you access a live chat function staffed by our customer support team. Although we have a small team, not everyone answering the chat will be familiar with your setup: they are best placed to answer questions about HosPortal functionality.
Mirror site
HosPortal has a site that you can use to explore functions and enter data without it affecting your real installation. We call this our Mirror site (other companies might call this a 'sandbox'). Further information can be found here.
Help for your non-admin users
During onboarding we will work with you to determine what support and training your users require. Our normal approach, which we have found to work very well in most circumstances, is to just provide some online guidance when users first log in. Doctors in particular are extremely reluctant to turn up to structured training and our system is usually intuitive enough that they do not need it.
Normal users have full access to all our help pages and can access the live chat function through the 'smiley face' button. If they ask you questions about how to use HosPortal then it is often easier to just direct them to us.