Nonprofit ECRI provides life-saving medical information with Microsoft technology

At the start of COVID-19, healthcare settings across the US were hard-hit. During those weeks—a time when recommendations and news seemed to change constantly—the healthcare-services nonprofit ECRI turned its decades-long expertise into authoritative guidance and assurance for healthcare workers from doctors and nurses to pharmacists and dentists.

“We quickly became their go-to partner for COVID-19 care, guidance, protocols, and protections,” remembers Stephen Pearl, executive director of Technology Operations at ECRI. The nonprofit provides impartial, evidence-based testing, counsel, and assurance so healthcare organizations can deliver safe, effective care.

ECRI immediately deployed Microsoft Teams to bridge the distance between newly remote colleagues and enable urgent, real-time collaboration. Staff took to Teams and ideated a new solution for constituents of ECRI’s membership model. The Aging Services portal and educational resources helped aging services organizations translate evidence-based best practices into concrete directives for frontline workers battling COVID-19.

“With the infrastructure of Teams, SharePoint, and more, Microsoft 365 kept us not only connected but collaborative so we could create new solutions to respond to the pandemic,” Pearl says. “Technology empowers everything we do.”

Upgrading technology to respond to critical medical needs

ECRI had been working on its digital transformation for several years; COVID-19 sped its adoption of what Pearl calls, “best-of-breed solutions.” Streamlining services and software helped ECRI address three main pain points.

Firstly, ECRI saw opportunities for new business lines and products, but building them from scratch was time-intensive and costly.

Next, the nonprofit aimed to strengthen its security to stay ahead of threats and protect sensitive data.

ECRI also needed a way to maintain its tight-knit culture and facilitate collaboration while staff worked remotely. The nonprofit’s impartial insights on the medical supply chain and patient safety was more needed than ever, so ECRI couldn’t afford a bumpy transition to working remotely.

Empowering a 100 percent virtual workforce

In the wake of stay-at-home orders to slow the spread of COVID-19, ECRI’s nearly 600 employees, including in the US, European Union, Middle East, and Malaysia, went virtual in mere days. “I think our organization embraced Teams and its capabilities so quickly that it made our work-from-home status a huge success,” says Andrea Vandeven, chief marketing officer at ECRI. “We’re not skipping a beat.”

Leadership prioritized maintaining the nonprofit’s collaborative culture, even when staff were spread out. The ability to see at a glance who is available to chat or call “means you don’t feel isolated,” Vandeven says. “We give huge kudos to the IT team because to us, it was seamless.”

ECRI staff were used to gathering in a conference room for meetings or brainstorming sessions. Cloud-based tools provided a similar opportunity for real-time collaboration from anywhere. “Microsoft 365 gives us the ability to have live, dynamic interactivity,” she says.

ECRI is enabling early adopters and hesitant users alike become more comfortable with the rapidly growing feature set in Teams. For example, it has staged a Teams sandbox channel. There, users can experiment with new features, such as Bulletins and meeting notes. Colleagues are using another feature, Planner, to track progress on collaborative projects without the learning curve (and overhead) of other project management software.

ECRI also worked with ConvergeOne, a member of the Microsoft Partner Network, to switch to Microsoft Teams phone. The partnership resulted in virtually no downtime during decommission and spin-up while freeing up budget for value-adding projects.

“Our investment in Microsoft 365 equips us to be a literally 100 percent virtual organization,” Pearl says. “Teams is the glue that brings us together.”

Defending medical data from cyberattacks

ECRI serves a range of constituents in the medical field that routinely deal with personally identifiable information and that are under strict privacy guidelines, such as HIPAA. These organizations often ask the nonprofit if they can comply. “We say yes, we’re locked down. The security we bring to the table is what they need,” Pearl says.

ECRI’s security posture has never been stronger, thanks in part to consolidating five stand-alone services into Microsoft 365 security. Centralizing the protection of the nonprofit’s assets—including on-premises and cloud solutions, servers, laptops, and more—saves ECRI $120,000 annually.

"Security is everything in 2021 and beyond,” Pearl says. “The future is bright for ECRI, and that is partly because Microsoft is empowering us to save money while improving collaboration, strengthening our hosting options, and hardening our infrastructure against external threats.”

The switch to remote work has made this task more important than ever. The more end-points, or laptops, staff use in home environments, the more important it is for AI to drive protection around the clock.

ECRI also uses Microsoft Intune to manage employees’ laptops, mobile devices, and applications (e.g. not allowing downloads of unapproved software). By limiting employees’ work within the Microsoft 365 sphere, the nonprofit limits exposure of its internal data, no matter what device is being used.

Microsoft 365 Defender displays an overview of the entire organization’s status via a single centralized dashboard. What’s more, Microsoft 365 security tools cover the breadth of the nonprofit’s systems and platforms with one policy, resulting in less work for IT staff and easier updates when needed.

Microsoft Azure Active Directory sends automatic alerts when it detects attempts to break through the nonprofit’s security. It also deflects phishing attempts and cyberattacks on a daily basis. Should any of these attempts succeed, ECRI would be notified immediately so the IT team could swiftly contain and repair the breach. “The depth and breadth of endpoint management and the real-time protection that Microsoft 365 provides has been a game-changer for us,” Pearl says.

Finding flexibility to innovate quickly

While responding to COVID-19, the nonprofit’s leadership developed a strategic vision: combine the power of Azure with ECRI’s DevOps automation to drive single-click, private-public cloud delivery of innovative applications and services.

“The ease of use and the extensive list of services that Microsoft offers in Azure—services like AI and machine learning—will help us spin up solutions positioned for strategic growth while improving our speed to market,” Pearl adds. “With that timeliness and flexibility, we can bring trusted answers to urgent questions asked in a COVID-19 and post-COVID-19 world.”

ECRI staff that serve constituents—hospitals, governments, payers, research centers, and the like—now approach the IT department with ideas for new products. Together, they innovate more often in a back-and-forth partnership.

“The IT leadership team gets calls now from people asking, ‘Can we do XYZ?’ In most cases, we say ‘Absolutely!’ Then we usually name a Microsoft product that can do it,” Pearl says.

In the DevOps culture ECRI cultivates, developers deploy more frequently, with proven code, through the automated continuous integration/continuous delivery pipelines built by its Enterprise Architecture team. If an update fails a deployment, rollback is automatic. If solutions are a success, they are automatically deployed to multiple targets, both on-premises and in Azure. “Azure gives us the horsepower, reliability, and scalability we need at a much-reduced cost” compared to its VMware facility, Pearl adds.

Further, the IT team isn’t constrained by using only one platform or product. Microsoft solutions are compatible with other products, which allows staff to use the tool best suited for the job at hand. It also allows them to avoid the time-intensive step of manually connecting products and hosting environments. Pearl adds, “Microsoft is friendly with other platforms, like Linux. Instead of reinventing pipelines, we deploy with a single click.”

The nonprofit has proven it can adapt to unpredictable changes. Pearl says they are ready to continue to serve their constituents no matter what the future brings.

He adds, “In this uncertain time, people are looking for facts, truth, and evidence to make life-saving decisions. Microsoft solutions help us provide this clarity to the world.”