Employees at St. Luke’s University Health Network (SLUHN) embrace the concept of digital health transformation with vigor, vision, and a commitment to caring that’s palpable in each of its 10 hospitals and 300 sites across Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Since the network deployed the Microsoft 365 productivity cloud and began empowering care teams to collaborate better and make faster decisions, there’s a sense of excitement over the potential to improve patient experience.
“As we move forward with our digital health transformation, we can say to our providers, we have a one-stop shop. It’s called Microsoft Teams.”
Jennifer Grell, MSN, RN, Director of Clinical Informatics and Training, St. Luke’s University Health Network
“You’re never done working on patient experience,” says Jennifer Grell, MSN, RN, Network Director of Clinical Informatics and Training at SLUHN. “We are accountable to our HCAHPS [Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems] scores. So, when we asked ourselves how we can improve patient experience, it meant we must look to our own people. And what is a good way for us to empower them? Microsoft Teams.”
Single collaboration solution drives care coordination
Microsoft Teams is the collaboration hub within Microsoft 365. SLUHN providers are replacing different third-party collaboration apps with Teams, simplifying their lives with a single workspace for anytime, anywhere conversations about patients. These digital “huddles” ensure that everyone on the care team coordinates their treatment plans, keeping the patient front and center.
“When you’re looking at the patient experience, you have to consider everyone, even the person that delivers the meal tray, and see how they are interacting,” says Grell. “Our goal was to impact the percentile ranking with HCAHPS, and with Teams to help coordinate care delivery, we've really been on an upward trend.”
Using Teams, SLUHN providers can maintain compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and Teams is interoperable with SLUHN’s electronic medical record system (EMR) and its scheduling software, AMiON. Given these three key capabilities, SLUHN endorsed Teams as the single solution for clinical communications across the network. “At SLUHN, our providers have the luxury of one collaboration system across the entire network,” says James Balshi, MD, Chief Medical Information Officer and Vascular Surgeon at SLUHN.
Over time, health communication has evolved from letters and phone calls to notes in the EMR to providers texting each other using their phones. “Even as we look to secure text messaging as one of the advantages of the ubiquitous cell phone, we still have to comply with HIPAA and other privacy requirements,” says Dr. Balshi. “But we don’t have to worry about that with Teams. It’s equally functional on the smartphone, tablet, and desktop computer. I use the camera technology on the phone to share patient information in a more secure and HIPAA-compliant manner with colleagues during a Teams video call. I’ve also shared EMR notes and X-ray images.”
Standardizing on Teams simplifies decision making on behalf of patients, especially when there are many providers involved and they are in different locations and departments. Dr. Balshi used to attend weekly meetings with the eight other vascular surgeons at SLUHN to review patients’ charts. “This delays the immediacy of care and prolongs decision making,” he says. “The longer we have to wait to make a decision about a patient, the more anxiety-provoking it is for the surgeons, the patients, and their families. Moving away from being tethered to a group meeting toward using technology to make coordinated care decisions that are immediate and spontaneous is the real benefit of Teams.”
Using Teams to stay connected and updated on patient care also reduces provider stress. As physicians move toward one platform, they won’t need to worry about keeping track of information in different collaboration apps, the EMR, and paper charts. Reducing the frustration of fragmented systems and paperwork means providers can spend more time interacting with patients. “Bringing everything together in one presentation, we can easily move between technologies in the interface that Teams provides us. It’s a simplified approach that helps to reduce the stress of the practice of medicine on the provider,” says Dr. Balshi.
A critical aspect of coordinated care delivery is schedule management. For the pulmonary and critical care physicians at SLUHN, that task falls to Dr. Deborah Stahlnecker. When she started practicing as a pulmonary and critical care physician at SLUHN, there were four doctors in her group, two hospital locations, and two office locations. Fast forward 13 years, and there are 13 doctors, six hospital locations, and five offices. “Managing the scheduling for different locations, particularly when we're covering both pulmonary and critical care, has been a challenge,” she says. “So is incorporating new physicians and advanced practitioners as they join the group to help when we need extra resources.”
When Dr. Stahlnecker first took on the scheduling responsibility for her group, she printed out Microsoft Excel spreadsheets for physicians to put in their pockets. The most recent copy hung up on the wall of their office. With this manual process, scheduling changes were not updated in real time, causing confusion when colleagues tried to connect with each other to discuss a patient. As SLUHN works to incorporate its AMiON scheduling software into the Teams environment, all that will change.
“With the capability of sharing schedules electronically, everybody can see the changes in real time and stay up to date with everybody’s location so we can reach each other immediately,” says Dr. Stahlnecker. “This is critical, because even though we're spread out in different locations, we still need to work as a team. Microsoft 365 has helped coordinate scheduling, and I can say that it’s going to make a tremendous improvement in my life. Using technology to reduce non-patient care activities will translate into more time with patients and a better lifestyle for me and all our providers.”
“Streamlined communications begins with quickly locating the people you need to talk to,” says Mary Gail Smith, Clinical Informatics Nurse at SLUHN. “Rather than asking the paging operator to look up people for you, you access AMiON in Teams, which saves everybody time. The faster you can find people, the faster you can have that discussion about how to improve health outcomes for the patient. It could be critical.”
A collaboration platform for the future of healthcare
As a foundational piece of the digital health transformation at SLUHN, Teams also acts as catalyst for thinking about innovative ways of bringing care to the patient—at home, in an ambulatory care setting, or in a hospital’s intensive care unit. “Our CEO, Rick Anderson, has always asked that, alongside our core mission, vision, and values, we always think about patient access,” says Grell. “If you come to SLUHN, you should have easy access to care. So, as we discover barriers, it's our job as clinical leaders of the organization to find out and help innovate ways to take down those barriers. With a tool like Teams, that makes our job a whole lot easier.”
Teams also amplifies the corporate culture at SLUHN that combines compassionate care with the ambition to improve. “We not only have this fantastic family culture and this great work environment, but we also continually innovate, look toward the future, and set the standard that everyone needs to reach,” says Renee Lapchak, BSN, RN, Clinical Informatics Nurse at SLUHN. As one of a team of informatic nurses, Lapchak works to empower and support providers by helping them see the value of new workplace technologies, such as Teams. Today, SLUHN has several pilot projects in place that showcase how a digital transformation empowers care teams to do more.
“One of our pulmonary practices uses Teams to communicate within the office and among providers,” says Smith. “Providers use the Teams mobile app on their phones, so they can instantly see if someone has a notification for them, whether they’re at their desk or walking down the hall at the hospital. We anticipate a huge benefit in using message alerts and notifications through Teams. A provider can act right away when an urgent message comes through to ensure timely patient care.”
Another pilot project with Teams aims to reduce readmissions. It targets high risk patients, such as those at risk for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. “We could use Teams to coordinate video calls in the home, bringing together the visiting nurse, the pharmacist, the primary care provider, and family members to review the care plan and the medications so we can keep the patient safely at home,” says Smith.
SLUHN providers envision using Teams to increase the involvement of patients and their families in care decisions, says Grell. “Let’s say my mom's in the hospital and my sister lives in upstate New York. How cool would it be for the nurse to bring in the iPad when the doctor visits my mom, so we could include my sister in a family meeting through a Teams video call. Or within the neonatal intensive care unit where babies are very prone to infection, it would be great to use Teams so distant family members could see the new arrivals. Bringing people together through Teams will be a huge asset for us to offer the patients and families that come to St Luke's.”
As SLUHN begins to use Microsoft 365 cloud services to streamline patient care, improve clinical outcomes, and drive efficiency, the network is moving toward the vanguard of healthcare delivery. “As we work with Microsoft, I think we have some great times coming, for our providers and our patients,” concludes Grell.
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Read more on St. Luke's Microsoft 365 chapter and St. Luke's Security chapter.
“Teams is equally functional on the smartphone, tablet, and desktop computer.”
James Balshi, MD, Chief Medical Information Officer, Vascular Surgeon, St. Luke’s University Health Network
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