Fraser Health boosts post-pandemic health services with holistic communications solution

Fraser Health operates a network of hospitals and community-based health services facilities, with almost 40,000 staff serving some 1.9 million people in the Canadian province of British Columbia. “Better health. Best in health care,” is the Fraser Health vision, and to that the Collaboration Services & eHealth team might well add, “Best IT services” as their contribution to bringing that vision to fruition. 

The organization is a few years into a broad digital transformation, and the Collaboration Services Team Manager, Dillon Brar, and Portfolio Manager Brianne Bourdon are engaged in an ongoing effort to seek out the best, most effective technology for knowledge workers, frontline care providers, and patients alike. Brar says, “Before COVID-19, we were already transitioning to the ability for our people to work from anywhere at any time. Now, ready or not, the hybrid workplace has arrived, and we need to use all the resources we have to make it a success.”

Care delivery challenges in a hybrid environment

The healthcare industry is, by convention, cautious in adopting new technologies, but as Rav Gill, Collaboration Services Project Manager at Fraser Health, points out, there’s a growing demand for the sorts of advantages offered by technology from everyone involved. “We’re transitioning from that traditional location-based, in-person model of care. We are asked to find ways to embed clinical collaboration and virtual care delivery into all our workflows and practices,” she says.

Staff are not slow to bring their requirements to the Collaboration Services & eHealth team. Among the requests they’ve heard are tools and services for more effective virtual patient visits, more efficient communications with colleagues and specialists, more immediate access to patient-related information, and opportunities to reduce paperwork and after-visit bookkeeping. In short, care providers want technology that enables them to spend less time on logistics and more time providing care. And along the same lines, their front desk and office colleagues want a more connected environment for efficient scheduling, calendaring, and overall patient and provider communications.

A comprehensive, scalable solution

The Collaboration & eHealth Services team needed a standardized solution that can scale to the entire organization and support a broad and extensible range of use cases that office staff, frontline workers, and patients alike would readily adopt. Gill says she wanted to use technology to help provide a more secure, seamless communication and collaboration experience, especially in difficult times brought about by pandemic conditions. “The situation with COVID-19 is causing organizations to implement solutions at a faster pace than ever before,” she says. “Clinicians need to be able deliver care while socially distancing where possible to ensure patient safety. Technology can help, but it must do so in accordance with our privacy and security standards.” 

The organization had already implemented Microsoft 365 as its digital transformation platform with success, so the team again turned to Microsoft for a communications solution to meet their needs.

Microsoft Teams, and a trusted partnership

Fraser Health chose to work with Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Calian, which provides a holistic platform that works with the rich communications and collaboration features in Teams. “We’re onboarding the Calian Corolar integration platform within our existing Microsoft 365 and Azure environment,” says Brar, “And the solution uses BizTalk Server, the integration layer that’s already part of the Fraser Health ecosystem, to bring together MEDITECH, Fraser Health’s acute care electronic health record, with Teams. Everything was already in place, it was just about bringing all the ingredients together.”

Microsoft Teams, as the communications and collaboration hub, was familiar to staff and administrators, and had already been widely adopted in non-clinical settings. With a nod to his colleagues in procurement, Brar sums it up: “It makes sense to use services that you're already paying for, right?”

The deployment went smoothly, taking around five months from conception to adoption and trials, with immediate advantages that prompted Fraser Health to consider broader deployment across its regional facilities.

Benefits of a Teams-based environment for staff and patients

Care providers now use Teams for virtual visits, and the team is rapidly building on the success of proof-of-concept trials with an aggressive rollout. Adding highly secure messaging brings team members, medical records, and clinician notes together in one place. Patients can more easily schedule visits, and customer service staff have a single interface providing up-to-date access to calendaring and appointment booking. Automated reminders help ensure patients keep appointments, and Bourdon notes that, “It is important to help maximize effectiveness and efficiency for care providers’ time spent with patients.”

The Fraser Health deployment also includes an app, built on Microsoft Power Apps, to help identify on-call physicians, their specialties, and statuses. Currently in trial, it enables available experts to be engaged through Teams meetings and private group chat for timely consults and triage.

The net result is that the new environment helps Fraser Health improve access to equitable care. “That's a really important value from this solution. Teams helps to connect providers and patients for their virtual appointments, helping make the best services available to everyone in our patient population and providing equitable access to those services regardless of geographical boundaries and personal circumstance. It is absolutely essential,” says Bourdon.

Gill says feedback has been very positive. Physicians and patients alike don’t have to travel for visits, and physicians can identify or contact colleagues for expert consults. “The solution allows information to be exchanged among providers and between providers and patients, increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of those virtual appointments,” says Gill.

As the new solution gains broader adoption across Fraser Health, facilities have found an unexpected advantage in the reduction of noise, as paging and telephone communications now occur in the Teams environment instead. This will prove particularly beneficial to those patients for whom environmental noise raises overall anxiety, while staff find it more convenient to receive messaging and notifications in a secure manner on their tablets and phones.

More features, more devices, more secure

It’s important that personal tablets and phones used by physicians meet the organization’s security and compliance requirements. In the past, staff would be reluctant to lose control by enrolling personal devices into managed end-to-end environments. So, Fraser Health uses Microsoft Intune mobile application management to control apps and services used on those devices without enrollment, to more securely add a BYOD—bring your own device policy—to the healthcare environment. Now, the organization can protect application content and Teams documents on personal devices just as it does on corporate shared and single-user devices.

And along with supporting more secure and efficient workflows and document exchange, Microsoft 365 helps meet compliance mandates for document and message retention and auditing.

Teams success in a healthcare environment

The successful rollout of new features and opportunities in a healthcare environment, to highly skilled and specialist individuals with high levels of personal responsibility, can be more challenging than in other organizations where changes in procedures and requirements might be more readily accepted. But the success of the new solution is generating its own momentum, and the team sees strong adoption ahead of further deployment. Gill says, “Solutions need to meet clinical needs for clinicians to adopt them. This integrated solution using Microsoft Teams meets those needs, and clinicians are already using Teams to conduct virtual video visits.”

And as far as deployment is concerned, Brar says he feels Fraser Health is just starting out on this digital journey. He’s anticipating new opportunities to raise efficiency and provide enhancements to the care experience for staff and patients in the future. “We’re just scratching the surface. It’s a new hybrid world we’re heading toward, and we’re very appreciative of our partners and the technology they bring, and our staff and patients who are proving it out and embracing its benefits.”

Asked if he has any messages for others involved in providing IT services in a changing healthcare delivery environment, Brar says, ”Let’s innovate, let's push this, we’re on the right path. Teams is proving to be a Swiss Army knife platform for us! We couldn’t have done much of this stuff just two years ago. And great partners can be essential in delivering successful outcomes; we’ll continue bringing problems and challenges to Microsoft and to Calian, and we’re looking to them to continue to bring us solutions.”

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