Resurgens Orthopaedics

Healthcare Provider Saves More than Half Its Budget on Unified Communications Solution

As one of the largest specialty practices in the country, Resurgens Orthopaedics operates many offices and surgery centers in the Atlanta area. Employees often need to attend meetings and training sessions in the company’s business office, but distance and heavy traffic often forced them to cancel surgeries or close clinics early to get to meetings on time. To relieve the travel burden and create a collaborative work environment, Resurgens deployed Microsoft® Office Communications Server 2007 with the conferencing and collaboration device called Microsoft RoundTable™. Now employees can attend virtual meetings in their local offices, and they can hear and see each other in real time. Meetings are recorded so that employees who can’t attend can view the sessions later. The solution helps Resurgens significantly reduce travel downtime, increase productivity, and deliver quality patient care.

Situation

If you happen to fall and break your ankle while jogging through metro Atlanta, consider yourself lucky: You have some of the best available care in the country at Resurgens Orthopaedics. With 19 medical offices and six affiliated surgery centers within a 40-mile radius of downtown Atlanta, Resurgens provides orthopedic, diagnostic, and rehabilitation services for patients with bone, ligament, muscle, and tendon injuries. In the last 30 years, Resurgens has evolved to become one of the largest orthopedic practices in the country, seeing about 32,000 patients per month and an additional 14,000 rehabilitation patients.

Microsoft was the only vendor that could deliver a complete solution with the features we needed in a user-friendly package. The fact that the cost was significantly less made it an easy decision.  Bradley Dick Director of Information Technology Resurgens Orthopaedics

Resurgens’ ubiquitous presence in the Atlanta area is good for patients but difficult for physicians when it comes to attending regular staff, committee, and board meetings held in the company’s central business office. With as much as 80 miles between offices, heavy rush-hour traffic meant that physicians spent a lot of time traveling to meetings. Often, they had to cancel afternoon surgeries or close their offices early to get to after-hours meetings across town on time. Shutting down early not only impacted patients, but also led to decreased productivity and lost revenue for the company.

Training was another challenge Resurgens needed to tackle because it also required employees to travel to regional offices. The company was planning to upgrade its electronic health record (EHR) system, which included significant changes to workflows and the user interface. Every doctor and staff member would need training because they all use the EHR for one function or another on a daily basis. “This job was too big for our relatively small internal training staff, so we knew we needed to find another solution for training,” says Bradley Dick, Director of Information Technology at Resurgens Orthopaedics.

In addition to EHR education, Resurgens, as a healthcare provider, must ensure that all employees receive training on the latest medical policies and compliance requirements. Because of the necessity of compliance training, Resurgens was committed to developing a more effective training program. The right training program could help Resurgens generate reports and documents to verify that employees were up-to-date on policies and procedures. Ideally, the company wanted a training solution with recording capabilities so that employees had the flexibility to receive training anytime and revisit course materials or compliance policies whenever they needed a refresher.

Solution

With the need for a training solution as its driving force, Resurgens put out a request for proposal in May 2007. “We received bids in the U.S.$100,000 range from vendors who would provide on-site training in our regional offices,” says Dick. At this rate, on-site training was an expensive proposition, and it still would not solve the problem of lost revenue and productivity due to employee travel time.

As an alternative to on-site training, Resurgens considered several hosted Web conferencing solutions. “That was going to cost several hundred thousand dollars, and it didn’t include the recording functionality we wanted,” says Dick. Moreover, Web conferencing involved paying a monthly fee, raised potential security concerns, and at the time didn’t provide an effective real-time video collaboration tool. “We wanted a solution that would allow people to say hello, read each other’s facial expressions, and feel involved in the conversation,” says Dick. “Without that capability, there's no way to engage people.”

Resurgens is no stranger to Microsoft® Office programs, so it made sense for the company to seek a Microsoft solution. “We are definitely a Microsoft shop,” says Dick. “We use Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, Microsoft Office Outlook® 2007, Microsoft Office Professional 2007, and all the Office productivity tools.” Dick was familiar with Microsoft Office Live Meeting, a hosted Web conferencing service, and had implemented two previous versions of it for other companies. But he believed a server-based solution would better meet Resurgens’ needs. “All of Resurgens’ offices are linked with redundant network connections, providing a significant amount of bandwidth,” says Dick. “We figured we’d leverage that, rather than go to a hosted service, because we have a data center where we can host it ourselves.”

In September 2007, Dick attended a CIO Summit and found the solution he had been looking for. There, he saw a demonstration of a Web conferencing capability in action—launched from within Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007. Essentially, this new on-premise conferencing feature in Office Communications Server 2007 provided the functionality of Office Live Meeting as a server-based product rather than a hosted solution—and with an identical user interface.

Office Communications Server 2007 with Office Live Meeting and RoundTable enables a company as big as ours to communicate readily and effectively, and that definitely gives us a competitive advantage.  Bradley Dick Director of Information Technology Resurgens Orthopaedics

The Microsoft RoundTable™ conferencing and collaboration device was also part of the demonstration. With this collaboration and the conferencing device’s built-in 360-degree camera and video software, RoundTable tracks the flow of conversation in a virtual meeting. People in different meeting locations can hear and see each other while they share information in real time. RoundTable, combined with the on-premise conferencing functionality in Office Communications Server 2007, met all of Resurgens’ requirements.

To demonstrate the value of the complete solution, Resurgens conducted a proof of concept. “It was kind of an epiphany moment when we set up a live meeting and had people join in,” says Dick. “People were saying, ‘Wow, I can meet with people in other offices and record it; it follows my voice and shows me who’s talking; and I can schedule the meeting from Outlook.’” It was all of those intangibles that made this solution a very simple decision for Resurgens. “Office Communications Server 2007 with RoundTable was the ‘slam dunk,’” says Dick. “Microsoft was the only vendor that could deliver a complete solution with the features we needed in a user-friendly package. The fact that the cost was significantly less made it an easy decision.”

Following the successful proof of concept, the board converted its existing software licensing agreement to a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement, which offers significant pricing discounts and includes Software Assurance for enhanced support and version updates. With the Enterprise Agreement, Resurgens was able to acquire Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007—a product that was outside the scope of the original budget—to round out its unified communications solution. Resurgens records meetings and training sessions using Office Communications Server 2007 and then makes the recordings available on demand to employees through Office SharePoint Server sites.

Benefits

Resurgens’ new unified communications solution has helped unite branch offices by encouraging and simplifying collaboration through virtual meetings. At the same time, the company has increased productivity and revenue with a solution that costs less than half what the company expected to spend. All of that contributes to Resurgens’ patients receiving the best possible care.

Enabled Remote Communication and Improved Productivity

With its new video conferencing capabilities, Resurgens has embraced a training model that works equally well for monthly board and committee meetings. The solution has the potential to significantly reduce employee travel between offices, and that goes a long way toward improving morale and productivity. Employees recognize that the company respects and highly values their time. Rather than closing up shop early to travel across town, employees now have the option to attend meetings and training sessions in their local or regional offices—without sacrificing any of the advantages of face-to-face meetings. “The technology in RoundTable is of significant benefit to us,” says Dick. “It addresses all of our needs for engaging people, being able to read facial expressions, and making people feel part of the communication.” And with the solution’s built-in recording capabilities, Resurgens records all meetings and training sessions, making them available at any time to all employees.

Reduced Costs and Improved Revenue

Several factors make Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 a cost-effective solution for Resurgens. “With our Enterprise Agreement, we only had to purchase a server license and six RoundTable devices at about $3,000 each,” says Dick. He estimates that a non-Microsoft solution would have cost well over $100,000 for the centralized equipment and an additional $15,000 per site for each of the six regional offices. Additionally, Resurgens avoids paying the monthly fee of a hosted Web service. “With Office Communications Server 2007, we saved between 50 and 75 percent of our expected budget,” says Dick.

He adds that Software Assurance significantly reduces management and maintenance costs. “With a non-Microsoft solution, we would need a separate maintenance agreement on every piece of hardware,” says Dick. “And from a software perspective, our engineers already know how to support Microsoft solutions, so we don’t need to send them for training on a new solution.”
 
Since deploying the solution in October 2007, Dick estimates that employees have saved more than 100 hours in travel time alone. “It’s difficult to estimate what that amounts to in dollars because the billing rate for a physician’s time varies, but I can tell you it is a significant amount,” says Dick. The recovered travel time helps Resurgens not only retain revenue but also deliver more hours of reliable and consistent patient care.

Increased Competitive Advantage

As one of the largest orthopedic practices in the country, Resurgens is challenged to maintain a sense of cohesiveness companywide in the face of its rapid growth throughout the Atlanta region. “Office Communications Server 2007 with Office Live Meeting and RoundTable enables a company as big as ours to communicate readily and effectively, and that definitely gives us a competitive advantage,” says Dick.

The communications solution also speeds time-to-market for services and for compliance. “The ability to train all of our staff easily and make sure that we’re up-to-date on the latest trends and medical procedures—that's a big thing,” says Dick. “The ability to record sessions and then have people go back to review them makes the solution doubly valuable.”

In the future, Dick anticipates the company will more fully utilize the presence, instant messaging, and direct-dialing features of Office Communications Server 2007. The fact that these features are available in line-of-business applications makes them convenient to use and enhances productivity. Resurgens also plans to develop some custom solutions based on Office SharePoint Server 2007 to generate compliance reports and documents. “I like having a single vendor, and we love the Microsoft technology,” says Dick. “We’re leveraging every Microsoft product we own to its fullest extent and look forward to continuing to do so.”

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
http://www.microsoft.com/

For more information about Resurgens Orthopaedics products and services, call (404) 847-9999 or visit the Web site at:
http://www.resurgens.com/

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Document published June 2008