St.Vincent Heart Center of Indiana

Hospital Improves Internal Communication and Business Processes with New Intranet

When it opened in 2002, St.Vincent Heart Center of Indiana was the first freestanding hospital in Indianapolis to provide advanced treatment of cardiovascular disease. Until recently, the hospital used an HTML-based intranet to disseminate announcements, links, and other information to its 470 employees and 200 contract workers. Information on that system was difficult to find. With help from Crowe Chizek and Company, a Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner, the hospital deployed Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007 in November 2007. The new integrated and interactive solution provides easy access to information, enhances productivity, improves communication, and supports increased security for confidential information. In a March 2008 survey, 87 percent of St.Vincent Heart Center of Indiana team members and contractors who completed the survey responded favorably to the new solution.

Situation

St.Vincent Heart Center of Indiana (SVHCI), a 120-bed facility, is one of 17 hospitals in the St.Vincent Health system in Indiana. The hospital employs 470 people and has an additional 200 contract employees. Founded in 2002, the facility has been ranked the number one provider of cardiac care in Indiana for the past three years by the leading healthcare ratings company in the United States, HealthGrades. Additionally, SVHCI has been recognized as a Top 100 Cardiovascular Program by Thomson Reuters, a company that uses the industry’s management and clinical outcomes to rate the highest hospital performers in the nation. The hospital is consistently in the upper percentile for patient satisfaction as rated by Press Ganey, a healthcare performance measurement and improvement company.

Office SharePoint Server has improved our team members’ productivity by offering users a streamlined intranet experience and has enhanced team member relations by providing information important to them.  Alec Williams Chief Information Officer St.Vincent Heart Center of Indiana

SVHCI team members had relied on an intranet that was created within an existing dashboard software program to communicate and find information including phone directories, clinical forms, and handbooks on policies and procedures. That intranet was difficult and time-consuming to use because it required users to scroll through all posted messages to find the information they were looking for. In addition, outdated information had to be deleted manually.

“We had a lot of information on the intranet, which was somewhat disorganized and confusing. We had everything from our café menu, newsletters, and pictures of events to important information that department managers needed to disseminate to team members,” explains Elizabeth Cisco, Vice President of Marketing and Development at SVHCI. “Users didn’t know where to begin, and they didn’t know what was important and what wasn’t. We needed a solution that would create an enhanced communications tool that was more robust, was easier to navigate, and was interactive.”
Additionally, anyone with an e-mail account at the hospital had access to all intranet postings, even information meant only for the members of a particular team. “The intranet didn’t have a lot of security levels or permissions built into it—everyone using it had access to virtually everything,” says Jane Richardson, Vice President of Human Resources at SVHCI.

In a team member survey conducted annually by SVHCI Human Resources, Richardson says that every year, “Communication was one of the top issues that team members identified as needing improvement. They noted that the existing intranet wasn’t providing effective two-way communication.”

SVHCI wanted to replace its intranet with a central portal that would improve communication and productivity by making it easy to publish and find information. The hospital also sought a solution that would streamline content management, organize the great diversity of content, and increase security by supporting customized permission levels.

Solution

The SVHCI Marketing department decided in February 2006 to improve how the hospital disseminated information. After the Marketing department met with IT staff, it became clear that the need for an improved intranet was essential to all areas of the hospital, in particular to the clinical areas where nurses and other medical staff work.

St.Vincent Heart Center of Indiana hired Crowe Chizek and Company, a nationwide consulting firm and Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner specializing in professional services and technology solutions, to help a committee analyze the existing intranet and design the new solution. “The committee completed a detailed assessment of what SVHCI business requirements were and what would be needed in a new platform,” says Ken Ruiz, Sales Executive at Crowe Chizek. “We mapped out everything from content management to business workflow.”

The committee considered moving to an externally hosted Web site. It also evaluated software solutions including IBM FileNet and Hyland OnBase. In January 2007, the committee decided to use Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007.

“We looked at other available solutions and found that SharePoint Server 2007 provided the functionality and collaboration tools SVHCI needed in a cost-effective model,” says Ruiz. Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides a single solution for facilitating collaboration, managing content, implementing business processes, and supplying the information that is essential to an organization’s goals and processes.

Once we did all of the orientations for Office SharePoint Server 2007 and everyone became familiar with it, we heard nothing but positive feedback from our team members.  Stephanie Mabe Administrator of SharePoint and Education and Communication Specialist St.Vincent Heart Center of Indiana

The software also works with Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003, which SVHCI currently uses. The hospital has been upgrading to the 2007 release of the Microsoft Office system in phases. Once that deployment is complete, users will be able to interact with SharePoint sites without leaving their Microsoft Office programs and to have two-way synchronization with collaborative information and documents.

In March 2007, six departments were selected to participate in the first phase of the Office SharePoint Server 2007 deployment: Education, Human Resources, IT, Marketing, Quality/Safety/Risk, and Pharmacy. Those departments, which had published the most content on the former intranet, updated and moved their information to the new Office SharePoint Server 2007 portal. A pilot test of the new solution began in September 2007.

The pilot was conducted over two months, during which time only committee members could access the site. Working with Ruiz and Crowe Chizek IT staff, committee members evaluated the new site’s usability and made suggestions about what libraries and categories should be included. 

The new intranet, named Online Source of Communication and Resources (OSCAR), was launched to all SVHCI hospital team members in November 2007. It includes a home page with announcements and links to important information, such as the physician on call, and to the portals of the six departments involved in the first phase of deployment. Another link on the OSCAR home page provides access to a clinical dashboard that the hospital calls “My Heart Matters”—a portal through which clinicians and physicians can access patient data and other resources related specifically to patient care.

At an open house introducing the new solution, the hospital’s team members learned how to take advantage of the new features in Office SharePoint Server 2007. Additional sessions included in-service training for nurses conducted by the Education department. “Once we did all of the orientations for Office SharePoint Server 2007 and everyone became familiar with it, we heard nothing but positive feedback from our team members,” says Stephanie Mabe, Administrator of SharePoint and Education and Communication Specialist at SVHCI.

According to a recent survey, 95 percent of SVHCI team members who completed the survey reported OSCAR is “easy to access.” The majority said information, such as clinical forms, the phone directory, announcements, and on-call physicians, was easily retrieved.

Working with Crowe Chizek ensured the success of the project, says Stephanie Hinchman, Project Manager and Administrator of SharePoint and Marketing Specialist at SVHCI. “Crowe Chizek team members were very helpful in guiding us through what we needed because of their process management and IT expertise. They were easy to understand as well as easy to work with.”

Members of the committee that drove the development of OSCAR look forward to completing the second phase of the deployment, which will make it possible for the hospital’s remaining 22 departments to be represented on the portal. Additionally, a subcommittee is establishing guidelines for content management, which includes defining the hierarchy of permissions for viewing, changing, or managing department sites.

Benefits

St.Vincent Heart Center of Indiana used Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 to create an intranet that gives its team members access to the diverse kinds of information they need, all from a single location. OSCAR improves the team members’ productivity by offering a streamlined user experience, enhances employee relations by providing information important to them, and helps increase the security of information residing on the portal. Additionally, the new intranet extends content management to individual hospital departments, allowing them to easily share information about themselves and their work.

Organizes Diverse Content in a Single Location

SVHCI now has an integrated solution that organizes everything from the most current hospital newsletter to a required clinical form. “On our former intranet, the forms were very difficult to find,” says Hinchman. “There are probably 400 to 500 forms, and there was a lot of navigating just to get to what you needed.”

With Office SharePoint Server 2007, we can make more information available to team members, and that information is more accurate and more timely.  Stephanie Hinchman Project Manager and Administrator of SharePoint and Marketing Specialist St.Vincent Heart Center of Indiana

Enterprise Content Management features in Office SharePoint Server 2007 help SVHCI centrally manage its information with consistent categorization, which makes forms easy to find. “After you go to OSCAR, you just click a category and use a drop-down menu of subcategories to access the form you need,” explains Hinchman.

Users who can’t remember the name of a form can type in keywords, and the Enterprise Search feature will suggest options. The Enterprise Search functionality integrates with the content management, collaboration, portals, forms, and business intelligence features of Office SharePoint Server 2007 to allow users to easily find, use, and share information regardless of type or which area of the portal the needed information is residing in.

Improves Productivity

With the Business Process and Forms features in Office SharePoint Server 2007, SVHCI can create workflows and electronic forms that automate and streamline its business processes, including the work of the many committees.

“When we schedule a meeting, we can complete a workflow on it, and we are able to include only committee members in the workflow,” explains Hinchman. “We can post the agenda, our objectives, a document library, and meeting notes. A lot of people aren’t able to attend all of the meetings because of their work shifts. However, if they work the weekend shift, and they miss the Monday morning meeting, they can look at the meeting notes to find out what was assigned and to whom.”

SVHCI can use the Business Process and Forms features to create built-in workflow templates that automate the approval, review, and archiving of OSCAR content. These custom workflows can help team members save time when participating in collaborative processes.

The business intelligence dashboards in the new solution are another important resource, especially for the Education department and nurses. “There wasn’t an efficient way to communicate class schedules or class registration confirmations. SharePoint gives control to the team member,” says Lori Alesia, Process Leader of Education at SVHCI. The Education department now has a site dedicated to continuing education. There, team members log on to their personal account to see what classes they have taken, determine what they still need to take, and sign up for an upcoming course.

“While we have incurred more external costs than we did on our former intranet, we are clearly experiencing increased satisfaction and improved efficiencies in terms of our team members’ productivity,” Cisco says.

Enhances Employee Relations

SVHCI managers now find that because OSCAR improves communications with team members, employee relations have also been enhanced. Communication can be challenging because the medical facility has numerous team member shifts—weekday as well as weekend shifts, which are further divided into day and night shifts. Migrating to the new intranet solution helps the hospital meet that challenge.

“With Office SharePoint Server 2007, we can make more information available to team members, and that information is more accurate and more timely,” explains Hinchman. “This is important for nurses, for example, because they don’t have a lot of time. When they need something such as physician on-call information, important links to medications, or policies and procedures, they now can find it quickly and easily. When they can do that, they are not as stressed and that keeps up the morale.”

The hospital also improved team member relations by creating a document library that allows the hospital’s chief operating officer to communicate to team members by creating messages and posting them in the library. “Team members can access new and archived messages at their convenience, which is important for employees who don’t work a typical 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. job,” says Richardson.

In addition, Office SharePoint Server 2007 has provided team members with an efficient, easy way to conduct surveys, which can also help improve team member morale. “Using surveys has given us an opportunity to give team members a voice in some of the decisions we are reviewing,” explains Richardson. “For example, we have many shifts on the payroll. So when team-building activities are being planned, a survey can be used to ask team members what date and time works best for them.”

Supports Increased Security

All hospital team members, including those who are contract workers, have access to OSCAR, so it is important that the solution support varying levels of user permissions. With the tools in Office SharePoint Server 2007, SVHCI can create customized security levels to determine which users can access a site and what those users can do with the content on it. Different content on the same site can even have different permissions.

Members of the permissions subcommittee are discussing what security levels should be established for sites that are available to everyone and for other sites that contain department-only information available only to those with permission. “Each site will be managed by a process leader—so we need to establish the protocol and decide how to manage all of the individual department sites,” explains Hinchman. The hospital expects to have a plan for security-level management in place by the third quarter of 2008.

Streamlines Content Management

The Enterprise Content Management features in Office SharePoint Server 2007 have made it possible for SVHCI to expand content management to individual departments within the hospital. Content presentation on OSCAR is standardized while allowing department team members to create content and manage information on their own sites.

“Instead of having to submit something and wait for it to be put up on the intranet, each department now owns its page and is responsible for putting up its own information, whether it’s a survey or some other important piece of information,” explains Hinchman.

Because the new intranet solution is easy to use, it has grown to be an important part of the business processes at SVHCI. “With SharePoint Server 2007, we have made a lot more information available on OSCAR than we ever could with our former intranet,” Hinchman says.

“Office SharePoint Server has improved our team members’ productivity by offering users a streamlined intranet experience and has enhanced team member relations by providing information important to them,” adds Alec Williams, Chief Information Officer at SVHCI. “Additionally, OSCAR extends content management to individual hospital departments, allowing them to easily share information about their process area and their work.”

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For more information about St.Vincent Heart Center of Indiana products and services, call (866) 432-7830 or visit the Web site at:
www.theheartcenter.com

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Document published June 2008