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December 16, 2021

St. Luke’s University Health Network nurtures a commitment to innovation with Microsoft tools

In 2018, Chad Brisendine, Vice President and Chief Information Officer at St. Luke’s University Health Network, met with the organization’s executive team to help decide what the future of the health network might look like. With 12 hospitals and more than 300 outpatient sites, any changes made would have far-reaching ramifications. “We all agreed that backing more innovation was a top priority,” Brisendine recalls. “We asked ourselves how we could use technology to improve our key operational capabilities, and ultimately, improve care delivery. That’s what led us to embrace Microsoft tools to support our commitment to innovation.” In the years since, Brisendine took on responsibility for a dedicated “innovation center,” and St. Luke’s has embraced Microsoft tools to help transform how it supports employees and delivers exceptional care. That includes adopting Microsoft Teams, Teams Rooms systems, and Teams Phone capabilities to transform collaboration, moving its electronic health record (EHR) system to the cloud with Azure, and moving to Dynamics 365 for improved insights into patient needs. “The new technologies we’ve rolled out will have a positive impact on hundreds of thousands of patients,” says Brisendine. “That’s how we’re making the most of Microsoft tools to bring innovation and care into our communities.”

St. Lukes University Health Network

In the years since, Brisendine took on responsibility for a dedicated “innovation center,” and St. Luke’s has embraced Microsoft tools to help transform how it supports employees and delivers exceptional care. That includes adopting Microsoft Teams, Teams Rooms systems, and Teams Phone capabilities to transform collaboration, moving its electronic health record (EHR) system to the cloud with Azure, and moving to Dynamics 365 for improved insights into patient needs. “The new technologies we’ve rolled out will have a positive impact on hundreds of thousands of patients,” says Brisendine. “That’s how we’re making the most of Microsoft tools to bring innovation and care into our communities.”

“The new technologies we’ve rolled out will have a positive impact on hundreds of thousands of patients. That’s how we’re making the most of Microsoft tools to bring innovation and care into our communities.”

Chad Brisendine, Vice President and Chief Information Officer, St. Luke’s University Health Network

Kick-starting a cloud migration for improved scalability and security

Responsible for 3 million patient records in 20 different environments, St. Luke’s made it a top priority to move its EHR system to the cloud. “We evaluated many different options for modernizing EHR management,” says Brisendine. “We moved everything to Epic on Azure because we wanted the scalability and level of security it offers.”

Disaster recovery played a big part in the decision-making process, too. “Good disaster recovery is so important,” says Brisendine, who also chose the Azure cloud platform for its automation capabilities, which help streamline maintenance tasks like patching. “On the security side, if you don’t have good patching practices, you have vulnerability,” says Brisendine. “We use the automation available with Azure to manage security in a timelier way,” he continues, noting that St. Luke’s uses Microsoft Defender for Endpoint to uncover advanced threats on all devices and stop attacks. Simplifying how IT employees approach security represents a “huge change in philosophy,” according to Brisendine. He uses the example of deploying patches to illustrate the change: “In the past, patching was a rigorous process. Now, our team can hit a button and automatically deploy patches easily, saving time and helping keep us secure. Using automation capabilities in Azure has reduced the steps needed to perform patching by more than 50 percent.”

Responding to the unexpected with Dynamics 365

Moving to a faster, more secure cloud environment with automation proved to be crucial to how well St. Luke’s responded to the demands of COVID-19. “During the pandemic, we faced the urgent need to organize vaccine distribution,” says Brisendine. “We had employer information stored in multiple systems, which could slow us down. So, we used Dynamics 365 to consolidate all that data into one system and communicate directly with the people who use our services through Dynamics 365 Patient 360. It’s helped us simplify a very complicated task.”

St. Luke’s plans to add Patient 360, part of the Care Management feature in Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, to empower call center employees with an omnichannel experience to better serve customers. Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare brings together capabilities within Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and Azure to make it easier for healthcare organizations to create personalized patient experiences, gives health teams connected care coordination tools, and adopts data standards that are important to healthcare. “Improving communication with our customers is our number one priority,” says Brisendine. “We’ll use Patient 360 to help ensure that all our customer interactions are backed by the right insights.”

“Improving communication with our customers is our number one priority. We’ll use Patient 360 to help ensure that all our customer interactions are backed by the right insights.”

Chad Brisendine, Vice President and Chief Information Officer, St. Luke’s University Health Network

In the early days of COVID-19, St. Luke’s vaccine call center activity surged from 500 calls a day to 5,000. “To help us better coordinate our response, we used Azure capabilities to quickly create a solution that reaches out to customers and helps get them into the call queue versus waiting for them to call us,” recounts Brisendine. The IT team used Azure DevOps to build customer workflows that matched patients with their nearest vaccination location and the next available appointment. Today, St. Luke’s is further streamlining that solution with Dynamics 365, and soon, Patient 360.

Delivering new programs and cost savings with Teams

Months into the initial pandemic response, St. Luke’s solicited feedback from divisions across the organization about their experiences. “Every one of our divisions credited Teams as a key reason for their successful response to the pandemic,” says Brisendine.

From clinical huddling and virtual visits with patients to an innovative new “tele-sitters” program to keep high-risk patients safer, Teams has become an integral part of how St. Luke’s delivers patient care through its healthcare workforce on the frontline. Doctors use devices equipped with Teams to add calling capabilities to their clinical messaging application. And for patient checkups, doctors use Teams to connect with patients in their rooms without the need for time-consuming travel to and from facilities or costly solutions installed in individual rooms. “We use Microsoft Bookings in Teams to schedule checkups with patients, who meet with doctors via Teams meetings on their mobile devices,” says Brisendine. “Connecting this way saves our doctors valuable time and helps ensure that patients still enjoy exceptional care.”

“We use Microsoft Bookings in Teams to schedule checkups with patients…. Connecting this way saves our doctors valuable time and helps ensure that patients still enjoy exceptional care.”

Chad Brisendine, Vice President and Chief Information Officer, St. Luke’s University Health Network

Microsoft Teams supports St. Luke’s tele-sitters program, helping employees monitor high-risk patients remotely and effectively. “The use of Teams for our tele-sitters initiative really helped us adapt to a staffing shortage and continue providing consistent quality of care,” says Brisendine.

Using Teams Phone to avoid a $15 million investment and Teams Rooms systems to transform meetings

St. Luke’s also undertook a transformation of its conference rooms and phone systems across 13 campuses and more than 350 outpatient facilities. “We installed Teams Rooms systems in conference rooms at every one of our campuses,” says Brisendine. “Getting a meeting underway in a conference room could be complicated in the past, but with Teams Rooms systems, it’s so easy to get connected with a single step.” St. Luke’s began introducing Teams Rooms systems before the pandemic, but the value of the new meeting spaces came to the fore in the era of social distancing when collaboration and clinical huddles still needed to move ahead despite the disruption. “Our whole Teams journey has been about creating a consistent experience wherever and however we’re communicating,” says Brisendine. “Organizations of our size often have a tangle of disjointed conferencing experiences. The Teams Rooms system helps eliminate that issue and creates a truly integrated experience.”

The organization further modernized communication by consolidating the St. Luke’s voice experience through Teams Phone. “We had many different telephony platforms and wanted to narrow that down to one. But we realized that standardizing on a single telephony platform would have cost $15 million dollars,” says Brisendine. “When we started to deploy Teams, I was excited that we could bring the simplicity of a software-based phone together with all the collaboration tools inherent in Teams—and avoid the costs of standardizing on a traditional telephony network.” For St. Luke’s, the opportunity to consolidate on a cloud-based phone system in Teams proved the value of investing in the Microsoft suite of tools. “When I need a solution, often I already have it within the Microsoft suite,” says Brisendine. “I get to add new capabilities without adding expense.”

“Standardizing on a single telephony platform would have cost $15 million dollars. When we started to deploy Teams, I was excited that we could bring the simplicity of a software-based phone together with all the collaboration tools inherent in Teams—and avoid the costs of standardizing on a traditional telephony network.”

Chad Brisendine, Vice President and Chief Information Officer, St. Luke's University Health Network

Addressing the demands of healthcare with Microsoft Power Platform and Teams

After the initial rollout of Microsoft tools at St. Luke’s, a 600-person network of digital champions evolved to help interested employees explore new capabilities. Power Automate, part of Microsoft Power Platform, is one emerging area of interest that Brisendine plans to scale up through education efforts aimed at the digital champions network. Power Automate is a low-code platform that even citizen developers can use to automate repetitive tasks; for instance, automatically sending emails to certain recipients when an invoice is approved. “Healthcare is so demanding,” says Brisendine. “When we use Power Automate capabilities to save employees 10, 20, or 30 minutes a day, it boosts their job satisfaction.”

“Healthcare is so demanding. When we use Power Automate capabilities to save employees 10, 20, or 30 minutes a day, it boosts their job satisfaction.”

Chad Brisendine, Vice President and Chief Information Officer, St. Luke’s University Health Network

St. Luke’s already used other aspects of Microsoft Power Platform—Power Apps for low-code and no-code app development and Power BI for data visualization—to build a personal protective equipment (PPE) tracking solution at the outset of the pandemic. IT drew on its available tools to quickly create a solution and help employees get the PPE they needed to stay safe on the job. “That, to me, is how we use technology to put patients first,” says Brisendine. “It’s about making our employees safer, and in turn, making our patients safer.”

Brisendine and his team also advocate using other apps within Teams to further streamline work and save employees’ time. “We incorporated our ServiceNow virtual agent into Teams so people can connect to IT support more easily,” he says. “If there’s another app that can help you do something more efficiently within Teams, we encourage people to add it to the interface.”

A new facility showcases St. Luke’s innovative culture

Since launching Microsoft 365 tools, the IT team at St. Luke’s has become an enabler for innovation in the business and won numerous awards, including two Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Davies Awards of Excellence. “Rather than telling people what they can’t do, we’ve boosted our ability to offer solutions to the business and given them the answers they want,” says Brisendine.

Those innovative solutions are on full display in St. Luke’s newest facility, which opened in November 2021. “Our new hospital showcases how we apply technology for great patient care, including a ‘tech connect’ area for patients to get set up with wearable devices when they leave the facility,” says Brisendine. Since deciding on innovation as a top priority in 2015, St. Luke’s has made the most of leading-edge technology to create extraordinary experiences for patients and employees alike. “After the success we’ve had with our technology investments, we asked ourselves how we could create a modern, twenty-first century hospital,” says Brisendine. “With this new facility, along with many other innovations, we’re seeing our culture of change in action.”

Find out more about St. Luke’s University Health Network on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

“Rather than telling people what they can’t do, we’ve boosted our ability to offer solutions to the business and given them the answers they want.”

Chad Brisendine, Vice President and Chief Information Officer, St. Luke’s University Health Network

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