Edmond Scientific Manages Strategic Communications and Public Outreach Efforts for Defense Health Agency (DHA)

Chantilly, Virginia

Highly performing organizations focus on improving outcomes and results with the resources on hand, and strategic communications is a key feature in the ability to align actions with policies and plans, engage with stakeholders and audiences to promote understanding and coordination, and demonstrate value by highlighting real performance and results.  Strategic communications doesn’t just happen.  It happens because plans are made to improve performance, goals and success metrics are determined, stakeholders for coordination and success are engaged, target audiences are identified, synchronized messages that align to goals are developed, and appropriate communications channels are efficiently used to deliver a clear and consistent message.

This is especially true for government agencies in transformation.  The reorganization of military health organizations into the Defense Health Agency (DHA) and the consolidation of the Defense Health Clinical Systems (DHCS) and Defense Health Services Systems (DHSS) into the Solutions Delivery Division (SDD) created great challenges in planning, defining and measuring success, maintaining intra-agency and interagency coordination, and communicating intentions and actions to users and system stakeholders.  Strategic communications is essential to facilitating change management associated with major Agency and Division initiatives.

Edmond Scientific Company (ESC) was selected to provide leadership and management of SDD’s strategic communications and outreach efforts.  Efforts focus on communicating the Division’s strategic message to include policies and plans; synchronizing information from various stakeholders and operational activities; communicating system- or product-specific information to promote user awareness and engagement; and demonstrating value and effective resource management by communicating performance improvements and savings to sponsors and customers.  All this is powered by web analytic tools to capture macro and micro performance metrics and activity, and a dedicated Metrics and Analysis (M&A) effort to capture Agency performance and process metrics as part of an Edmond Scientific Quality System and Business Process Improvement (BPI) effort.

The result is a coordinated business transformation that maintains alignment with goals and promotes awareness and understanding throughout the organization.  Success is achieved through comprehensive communications planning and execution by expert staff that is able to optimize media and communications channels with cost-effective tools, techniques, and strategies to deliver a customized, coherent message through a variety of artifacts.  Edmond Scientific’s benefit is that we provide a cost-effective solution and experienced staff to help demonstrate value, highlight success, communicate and coordinate information flow, and facilitate the continued ability to effectively utilize resources to improve performance and delivery.