Saint Peter’s Healthcare System modernizes processes to better fulfill its mission with Microsoft Teams and Surface

Michelle Lazzarotti, Senior Director of Marketing for Saint Peter’s Healthcare System in New Brunswick, New Jersey, believes that her organization’s faith-based mission is a big contributor to its success. Centered around a 478-bed teaching hospital, Saint Peter’s is best known for providing care for women and children, with a state-designated children’s hospital and regional perinatal center that includes a Level IV Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.

Among its staff, Saint Peter’s is equally well known for a strong culture of compassion and support that drives positive employee and patient experiences. “Because we’re so committed to that mission, people truly find value in all that we believe in,” says Lazzarotti. “We have very high patient and employee satisfaction scores.” Saint Peter’s calls this commitment to patients and employees its “Journey to Excellence,” and it is reflected in high employee engagement: at the 87th percentile among healthcare organizations nationally. Managers know these satisfaction scores across every unit, and use them when looking for areas to improve, from nursing to environmental services to IT.

Finding new ways to communicate and collaborate with Teams 

IT leaders embrace this culture, too, with solutions that both improve patient outcomes and empower employees. “Everyone bends over backwards to help each other out,” says William Rears, Chief Technology Officer. “We are a large family at Saint Peter’s.”

Microsoft Teams became a natural fit in the same way, providing a platform to help workers connect and collaborate while giving IT more flexibility and simplifying access to resources. A test of Teams by the IT department before the pandemic turned out to be good timing. 

“When COVID hit, we sent half our IT team—who did not have to be on-premises—remote on literally a day’s notice,” says Jordan Tannenbaum, VP, CIO, and Chief Medical Information Officer for Saint Peter’s. “We didn’t miss a blip. And we were able to give [Teams] to other units who needed it.” 

Teams also replaced conference calls, transforming the way IT coordinated upgrades and recovered from downtime. The ability to instantly create Teams meetings brought more innovation and connectedness to the process. IT can now more easily work through checklists and spreadsheets without worrying about version control or who is doing which task. 

“As they go through the checklist, they update it in real time,” says Rears. “We’ve never had that real-time information within a meeting, where it’s just the instant gratification of knowing.” 

Saint Peter’s began using Teams as a platform to organize COVID-19 vaccination clinics, too, connecting resources and coordinating communication between the many departments involved. “We were able to centralize the information instead of sending out 50 emails,” says Tannenbaum. “We kept all our data there.” 

Switching to new tools can be hard, but Tannenbaum appreciates that Teams has helped ease that transition, with the ability to send Teams invites to meetings in other conferencing solutions. “People think of [Teams] now,” says Tannenbaum. “‘OK, I’ve got a project, do I need a team for this, who should be on it, how do we organize it?’ It is much more efficient... you do not have to send 10 emails or look for the emails. Everything is in one place.” 

Streamlining technology to increase savings, security, and efficiency

Rears found that Saint Peter’s was struggling with the cost and complexity of using many different tools. Teams and SharePoint have been part of a streamlining effort, including unifying email on a single platform, managing mobile devices with Microsoft Intune, and consolidating data and HIPAA-required email archiving.

“It’s all now baked into the Office 365 products that we’re using,” says Rears. “There’s also training through Microsoft Store to increase adoption of Teams. It’s really been a cascading effect. We’re deploying all these technologies—at the same point, we’re simplifying our lives, saving money, and making what might have been manual processes more efficient.” 

Making the virtual rounds with Surface

What if on-call physicians could virtually consult with patients without being on site? That idea inspired a pilot with Microsoft Surface, transforming the way physicians perform rounds using a mobile cart equipped with a Surface Pro device and telemedicine app. Several physicians use them to interact with patients within the PICU (Pediatric Intensive Care Unit). “These pediatric intensivists can see the monitor tracing, the history, and they have direct camera access to the child,” says Tannenbaum. “It’s really an incredible thing, and Surface is critical to providing that kind of care.”

Physicians also appreciate the durability of Surface devices, and how they can run many different applications. “It wasn’t a bulky laptop that doctors had to carry around with them,” says Rears. “They have great battery life. The doctors like the little folding, detachable keyboard.” 

Moving to the cloud with Azure

As Rears considers how Saint Peter’s handles infrastructure in the future, he sees an opportunity to reduce the time and cost of supporting hundreds of applications. “We need to get away from infrastructure within our data centers,” says Rears, as he looks ahead to piloting Azure-based deployments. His team plans to learn how to stand up Azure servers securely, maintaining HIPAA compliance and disaster recovery. 

Rears hopes to take advantage of the Microsoft ecosystem and tools they’re already using to build on that familiarity. “We want it to be second nature to stand up one of these servers in the Azure cloud,” says Rears. And the goal isn’t just to reduce costs but to increase agility. “It’s so we can easily spin up servers when there’s a new project,” says Rears. “Like if Jordan says, ‘Hey, I need a Tableau server set up tomorrow, what can we do?’ It’s there for you, I can have it ready in 15 minutes.”

Security and stability are always a priority, of course. “I need stable solutions, and I know from a security perspective, Microsoft can accommodate us,” says Rears.  

Maximizing uptime with strong support

Saint Peter’s uses training and troubleshooting from Microsoft Unified Support as an extension of the IT team. 

“Everyone talks about ‘Are you five 9s?’” says Rears, referring to an industry standard of 99.999 percent system uptime, or only about five minutes of downtime per year. “Our expectation is not five 9s, it’s 100 percent uptime. If we have a problem, we need to have backup that realizes our important mission and gets us up and running. And I have to tell you, that’s been Microsoft.”

Rears relates how Unified Support helped resolve a downtime issue involving an EMR vendor and an always-on SQL cluster. “[They] were in the trenches with us, on the phone troubleshooting, and they helped point out to the vendor what was wrong,” says Rears. “That may have cost us another seven to eight hours but was constrained to just a couple hours. And hours in the hospital? That can be patient lives.” 

Building a foundation for the future

Saint Peter’s response to the challenges of 2020 has strengthened its relationship with Microsoft. “I think that’s a lesson learned out of COVID, that we can take a Microsoft product and really leverage it,” says Tannenbaum. “Microsoft has been a very solid partner, who really works to promote your growth, digital literacy, and transformation.”

As the team at Saint Peter’s looks ahead, it sees many possibilities to continue that transformation—with collaboration tools, with process automation, with Incident Command apps that integrate with Teams to improve crisis response. 

“Honestly, I think we’re still scratching the surface,” says Rears. “Whether that’s Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint or the gazillion different applications in Teams you can bolt on. The ecosystem is quite vast. We’re really looking at what’s the next technology that we want to bring in from Microsoft.”