Danske Fysioterapeuter builds an online community

To read a Danish version of this case study, click here.

Danske Fysioterapeuter is the association of physiotherapists in Denmark, and offers a wide range of professional services to its 11,000 members. Based in Copenhagen, the association employs around 50 staff.

One of Danske Fysioterapeuter’s most important responsibilities is to help its members develop as professionals. It runs a number of specialist courses, which are attended by more than 2,000 people each year, and also acts as a key source of information and professional guidance on all aspects of working practice.

Building an online community
“We want our members to see us as their first point of contact for professional development and support,” says Mikael Mølgaard, Manager of Communications at Danske Fysioterapeuter. “We wanted to find a better way to communicate with them – and help them communicate with each other – by building an online community.”

The association’s existing Web site was primarily a site which pushed out the same information to all members. It also hosted a number of Internet discussion forums.

“Our members found the forums very useful for sharing knowledge, so we decided to build a new online platform that would extend the interactivity of the site and offer a wider range of tools and services,” comments Mikael Mølgaard. “We performed a detailed requirements-gathering exercise, and then started thinking about which technologies we should use to build the solution.”

Finding the right partner
The Danske Fysioterapeuter team consulted several technology vendors, and was impressed by a proposal from IBM and its Business Partner, INOPI.

“We had worked successfully with INOPI before, and we were impressed with the capabilities of their proposed solution,” says Mikael Mølgaard. “By implementing a range of standard collaboration tools surfaced through IBM WebSphere Portal, INOPI’s proposal avoided the cost and complexity of developing entirely new systems. As a result, INOPI was able to offer us a very competitive price, and has implemented a solution that meets all of our needs.”

New tools and services
The new portal provides each user with a personalised home page, with news feeds that can be set to deliver information that is relevant to their specific interests. This functionality is delivered by a tool called YONC (www.yonc.com), which filters different content to different groups of users, based either on specific criteria or personal preferences. From this home page, users can access email, provided by SurgeMail (www.netwinsite.com), or use applications that allow them to search for new jobs or reserve places on Danske Fysioterapeuter’s training courses.

“The course booking application is a great help for our staff and members, because it eliminates a lot of paperwork,” explains Mikael Mølgaard. “There is no longer a risk of paper forms getting lost or misfiled, there is much less administrative work, and the whole process is more or less instant.”

In addition to these tools, the portal also helps users communicate with each other. Integration with IBM Lotus Sametime provides instant messaging, while a custom-developed tool helps members to search for each other, using details such as place of work, education, interests, job type and other data held in user profiles.

“Chatting online with other physiotherapists can be a great way for our members to answer each others’ questions, share knowledge of new techniques, or build professional relationships,” says Mikael Mølgaard.

IBM Lotus Quickr provides personal storage areas and file-sharing capabilities that enable members to share documents and other work-related files, as well as online forums, blogs and wikis.

“Combining Lotus Quickr and WebSphere Portal gives us a wide range of features that promote collaboration,” explains Anne Larsen, Webmaster at Danske Fysioterapeuter. “It’s not just file-sharing: the solution also provides a much more flexible way of managing forums and knowledge bases.

“We still have about 35 main forums that we moderate, but users can also create open or closed forums where they can exchange experiences and collaborate, without the influence of Danske Fysioterapeuter. We provide a platform that allows users to make their own groups to meet their own needs – whether it’s exploring professional interests or maintaining personal relationships with other physiotherapists.”

Looking to the future
“This is just the beginning,” she adds. “The WebSphere Portal solution is highly versatile and easy to integrate, so if we want to add new tools in future, it should be relatively simple. With the help of INOPI’s technical expertise, we plan to keep extending the solution to meet the needs of our members.”

By giving its 11,000 members a simple way to communicate, collaborate and share knowledge online, Danske Fysioterapeuter hopes to bring its members closer together and create a more united professional community.

“The portal solution has only been online for a few weeks, but we are already seeing a considerable increase in site traffic as users discover the benefits of the new tools and services that are on offer,” concludes Mikael Mølgaard. “Ultimately we hope that it will make membership of Danske Fysioterapeuter an even more compelling proposition for physiotherapists throughout Denmark.”