Case study: Mid Yorkshire Hospitals improves communications with OCS

Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust has been working with unified communications specialists POSTcti on a trial of Microsoft Office Communications Server. The benefits have been so impressive that it is planning to roll it out to 1,000 of its managers, doctors and their support staff. Lyn Whitfield reports.

Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust provides hospital services for half a million people living in and around Wakefield and North Kirklees.

Its three main hospitals in Dewsbury, Wakefield and Pontefract are up to 30 miles apart - which presents quite a challenge for staff who need to travel between them.

Parking is limited and although the trust operates a shuttle bus, it can take half a day to get to and from a meeting. The trust has invested in video conferencing suites at Dewsbury and District Hospital, Pinderfields General Hospital, and Pontefract General Infirmary.

But assistant director of IT services and medical records James Rawlinson says these have a number of limitations. “The video conferencing works, but there are only three units,” he says. “People have to go to a particular room to use it, and they might find it is in use when they get there.”

Trialing OCS

To improve its communications, the trust’ has been trialing Office Communications Server (OCS), which is Microsoft’s platform for presence, instant messaging, voice and conferencing.

One hundred of its staff have been using OCS for home working, audio-conferencing and discussions over webcams. The trial has delivered such immediate benefits that the trust is now planning to roll out OCS to all of its managers, doctors and their support staff and to fully integrate it with its telephone and video-conferencing systems.

Mr Rawlinson says the big, unexpected benefit has been presence; being able to see immediately what people are doing and the best way to reach them.

“Instead of having to telephone somebody’s secretary to find out if they are in their office – and then chasing them around the hospital if they are not – it is possible to get hold of them instantly,” he says. “That has caused greater excitement than anything else because consultants and nurses spend a lot of time looking for expertise in particular areas.”

Building on existing infrastructure

Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust recently worked its way through the National Infrastructure Maturity Model that the NHS’ IT agency, NHS Connecting for Health, has developed to help trusts identify gaps in their infrastructure and priorities for future development.

 One of the things that came out of NIMM was that the trust needed a communications strategy. It has already upgraded its intranet using Microsoft’s collaboration platform, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, so it has decided to focus on aligning its existing video-conferencing with desk-top conferencing.

OCS was suggested as a technology for doing this, and the trust worked with Dell and unified communications experts POSTcti to pilot it with 100 users.

“The trust approached POSTcti to do some integration, so that when people are on the phone they get presence information,” explains account manager Adrian Sturdy. “That means that if somebody wants to call you, they can see if you are on the phone already and, if you are, they can send you an SMS or email instead.”

OCS works with Microsoft’s Active Directory, so that when people log-in to use Microsoft Office programmes, such as Word, or Microsoft Exchange, to use email or calendars, it generates a ‘sphere’ showing the best way to contact them.

“OCS generates productivity savings, because it cuts the time it takes to get hold of people. We usually say that you will see 10 to 15 per cent productivity benefits, just from OCS,” says Mr Sturdy.

Benefits for clinical biochemistry

The six clinical biochemists and consultants in Mid Yorkshire Hospital’s department of clinical biochemistry have made particular use of OCS’ capabilities. Marieke Jordaan explains that the group meets once a month, but “we did not have sufficient time to devote to audit and case discussions.”

Another meeting was impossible because travelling between sites took too much time out of a working day. Since June 2008, the group has supplemented its meetings with audio-conferences.

“This simply involves the host and participants ringing the same telephone number at a pre-scheduled time and keying in a code provided by IT,” says Jordaan, a consultant clinical pathologist. “Afterwards, we only need to put the phone down to carry on with our other work.”

As soon as desktop conferencing became available, the group took it up. “This enables us to see one person’s computer screen on our own [PC] and thereby view whichever document that person opens, be it a PowerPoint presentation, a Word document, an Excel spreadsheet or anything else,” says Jordaan.

“For the time being, discussions are still held via the telephone, but our webcams have now arrived and we are looking forward to ‘hands free’ sessions. This has been a great time saver for us. There is no need for planning a day around being on a particular site; we can take part wherever we happen to find ourselves on the day.”

Benefits for the whole trust

Other members of the trust’s staff have found the new facilities useful for home working. “People can access this over the internet, so colleagues might not even realise they are not in their office,” says Mr Sturdy. “When it snowed this spring, people were able to continue to work from home and to share information as if they were at work and not stuck miles away.”

Meanwhile, Mr Rawlinson says OCS has not put new demands on his IT department. “POSTcti are very good, very knowledgeable, and it has all gone pretty smoothly,” he says. “Training is available, but people ring up and say ‘is it like MSN’ and we say ‘yes, it is’ and they say ‘oh, I don’t need training then.’ It is very intuitive and easy to use.”

The trust is now planning to roll out Microsoft Office 2007, as part of which all staff will get OCS. “We also want to integrate it into our IP video-conferencing and into our telephone service, so that more people can do desk-top conferencing,” says Mr Rawlinson.

“There is a cultural issue. People say ‘I already have a phone and a mobile and email, so why do I need this as well?’ But as soon as they see it they want it. People are coming to us all the time with new ideas for using it.”