St. Luke’s takes care of the future of health with the Microsoft 365 productivity cloud

“When I finished my vascular surgery fellowship and moved back home, it was a given that I work at St. Luke’s,” says Dr. Balshi. “I value the long-term personal and professional relationships we build here, both with colleagues and patients.”

Today, this culture creates a strong family feeling that’s a perfect fit for a network that serves a mid-sized market of approximately a million people across 10 counties in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. “It’s rewarding to have that family feel but also to see the great clinical work we do because we are just big enough to stay at the forefront of healthcare innovation and technology,” says Ed Nawrocki, President of the East Region and Anderson Campus at SLUHN.

Improving patient experience with Microsoft 365

Technology plays an increasingly important role as SLUHN responds to the evolving healthcare needs of the communities it serves. One of Dr. Balshi’s roles is to provide guidance on how to navigate the challenges of a rapidly evolving health sector. “The tremendous increase in regulations and the rapid expansion of healthcare information put pressure on providers, over and above their work taking care of patients,” he says. “So, any technology that allows us to collaborate and communicate is critical to making us efficient and helping us to improve patient experience.”

SLUHN delivers better quality of care by using Microsoft 365, which includes Office 365, Windows 10, and Enterprise Mobility + Security, as the foundation for a highly secure, collaborative work environment for both clinical and administrative employees. With everyone working better together, more and more patients are experiencing the kind of care that Sarah Trimmer had when she turned to SLUHN after a devastating diagnosis. “I lost my dad to cancer. I lost my mom to cancer. And then I was diagnosed with cancer at the age of 30,” she says. “I knew that I didn’t want to deal with the same network or doctors that my mom and dad had. Every new office we went to, I had to explain who I was, why I was there, and what we were doing with my dad’s treatment. As a patient, the last thing you want to worry about is if your doctors are in lockstep with each other.”

All that changed when Sarah listened to a friend’s advice. “I knew right away that St. Luke's was different,” she says. “Every time I came for an appointment, they knew who I was. All those doctors communicated with each other, making me feel very comfortable. I knew I was in really good hands.”

Four years later, Trimmer is cancer free. “My wife and I are renovating a house right now,” she says. “I'm really happy that I'm strong enough to swing hammers!”

With Microsoft 365, SLUHN empowers care teams with more powerful tools to discuss patients, find and secure information, and improve healthcare delivery. “As we take steps toward a digital health transformation, we chose Microsoft because of its strategic vision around leveraging technology to advance healthcare,” says Chad Brisendine, Chief Information Officer at SLUHN.

The importance that SLUHN places on patient experience is demonstrated by one of the first apps it developed using Microsoft 365 to help providers improve their people skills. Previously, SLUHN used a manual process to give feedback on patient interviews. Today, SLUHN automates this process in Microsoft Teams with a project called the Patient Experience Communication Round. Clinical round reviewers use their phones to access a form created in Microsoft Forms and stored in Teams, so they can fill out their observations in real time during the round. Next, an app created using Microsoft Power Apps pushes that form to a Microsoft Power BI dashboard for hospital executives and managers who can sort the information by facility, practice, or provider. Finally, the provider receives a score in a secure text message.

“It’s so important to get that connection between provider and patient right,” says Jennifer Grell, MS, RN Director of Clinical Informatics and Training at SLUHN. “With one click, we launch Teams to perform an observational audit on our clinical providers and then give them feedback from that observation.”

“We also collate all the material from the audits in a dashboard where we can slice and dice the data to understand how patient engagement is experienced at SLUHN,” adds Charles Sonday, DNP, ANCP-BC Medical Director of Informatics at SLUHN. “We’re committed to improving patient experience, and personal interactions with patients is the most immediate way we can demonstrate how much we care.”

A new vision for collaborative healthcare 

Since SLUHN embarked on its digital transformation journey about 18 months ago, Teams has emerged as the hub for caregiver collaboration capable of fostering healthcare communications that result in the connected, responsive patient care that Trimmer experienced.

SLUHN has deployed Teams on providers’ mobile devices for anytime, anywhere clinical communications that promise far-reaching implications for health delivery across the entire network. SLUHN is replacing several third-party collaboration apps with Teams, simplifying providers’ lives with a single workspace for conversations about patients that is available to the entire care team. Having multiple communications systems contributed to information overload for providers. The overlapping communications systems meant providers couldn’t fully comprehend a patient’s case without piecing together fragments from multiple sources. “We require highly secure, encrypted messaging to comply with HIPAA, and Teams provides that fundamental capability for us,” says Brisendine.

Because Teams works with SLUHN’s AMiON scheduling app and electronic medical records (EMR) solution, it satisfies requirements for health communications today and opens the door to future innovations in healthcare. “Practicing medicine in an isolated environment shortchanges the patient,” says Dr. Balshi. “From specialists to nurses to lab services, right down to the guy who fixes the fuse on the ultrasound machine, everyone needs to know each other’s availability to communicate on behalf of the patient. Being able to access our EMR and scheduling solution from Teams means we can support that level of communication. It’s very powerful.”

As care providers use Teams to collaborate behind the scenes, conversations are conducted in real time. Thanks to the highly secure chat and document collaboration features within Teams, clinicians can coordinate care and quickly resolve issues—resulting in improved patient safety. “Using Teams-based collaboration in a clinical communication environment will greatly improve patient care,” says Brisendine.

SLUHN is also exploring the benefits of interoperability between its EMR solution and Teams. “Pulling information out of the EMR into Teams and getting it to a provider in urgent situations will add so much to the conversation on behalf of a patient,” says Dr. Balshi.

Teams in care today

Today, SLUHN is conducting several pilot programs that showcase the value of Teams in different healthcare scenarios. According to Grell, Teams is making a huge difference in personal productivity in both clinical and administrative settings by bringing together traditionally fragmented systems. Like Dr. Balshi, Grell was born at SLUHN, and her 27-year tenure gives her good insight into how things have changed at the bedside.

“Prior to Microsoft Teams, we had everything stored in a million different folders, computer drives and, in some cases, a drawer,” she recalls. “Now with Teams, we have all our information in one place and we’re more organized and efficient. This gives us more time building relationships with patients and colleagues.”

In one pilot that focuses on patient safety, the health network applies AI to its EMR solution to identify patients at a high risk for physiologic deterioration and uses Teams as the communication platform to immediately send that data to clinicians. Providers use the information to either interact with the patient immediately or forward to a colleague on the care team who can act more quickly on the patient’s behalf. “Message priority is a key aspect of our Teams communication strategy for patients at high risk,” says Sonday. “It cuts through the volume of information that a clinician needs to process, decreasing the cognitive load and improving overall job satisfaction.”

SLUHN also uses Teams to reduce risk and improve patient care in the Venous Thromboembolism (VTE) Quality Project. This pilot program addresses the development of blood clots that can travel to the lungs with potentially life-threatening results. To avoid this, patients wear compression sleeves. Previously, caregivers monitored wear-time compliance and patient blood pressure bi-weekly with manual data entry into the patient record. The VTE group developed a channel in Teams where a Power BI dashboard displays data taken by the clinician using an app made with Power Apps.

“Going from bi-weekly monitoring to real-time monitoring provides instant feedback to improve our already rigorous hospital quality standards and decreases patients’ risk of developing a pulmonary embolism,” says Sonday. “It also helps our executives and unit managers to track compliance ratings.”

Another initiative, called the Pulmonary Teams Practice Management Pilot, includes approximately 40 pulmonologists, practice administrators, and respiratory therapists who use Teams as a one-stop shop for everything in the pulmonary discipline at SLUHN. “This is a great test case for using Teams as the collaboration hub to manage medical operations pertaining to a specific discipline,” says Sonday. “Here, everyone can discuss general practice operations, so if we have a surge in critical care patients at one campus and we need to deploy an extra pair of hands there, we have a way to arrange that quickly. And from an administrative perspective, Teams keeps all our content memorialized and more secure.”

These pilot projects have implications for other departments and care teams at SLUHN and for shaping the future of care delivery across the network. “The pulmonary pilot project offers a test case for how we can interact using Teams for both inpatient and outpatient scenarios,” says Sonday. “I can see that transitioning to critical care and trauma. The VTE Quality Project helps us develop a use case for all our committees across the network where real-time data can measure quality improvement.”

As providers begin incorporating Microsoft 365 collaboration solutions into their daily work to achieve better outcomes for patients, there’s a cadre of informatics nurses like Grell who, through clinical collaborations and network committees, work to erase the information technology and clinical divide. “My role at SLUHN as an informatics nurse really helps our vision for digital health transformation,” says Renee Lapchak. “We help clinicians with using technology appropriately, so that it doesn't feel like it's getting in the way. Using the computer in the optimal manner with a patient, you will see smiles, you will see active listening, you will see patients asking questions and answers coming from the clinician. It's a give and take that is exactly what we're looking for in the clinical environment.”

Securing mobile, collaborative care

Using Teams in these settings depends on having a robust workplace security posture in place, especially regarding mobility. As healthcare providers move through treatment protocols and practice in different clinics and care settings, they need to trust that they can securely access the information they require, wherever they are. “Because Microsoft 365 includes Intune, we have a built-in solution to manage mobile devices used by providers in care settings and by administrators in the office,” says Brisendine.

Employees at SLUHN must register their devices through Microsoft Intune to access any Office 365 app or SLUHN app on their devices. “The beauty of Intune is that we can reach into those specific apps and better protect the data within them,” says David Finkelstein, Chief Information Security Officer at SLUHN. “We gain a level of control that gives me comfort and helps us fine-tune that balance between productivity and our security posture. At the end of the day, the ability to tell patients that we take care of their personal health information improves their experience at St. Luke’s.”

With Microsoft Cloud App Security, SLUHN has already gained visibility into its many unmanaged, third-party software as a service (SaaS) apps, solving a major pain point. “One of our challenges prior to deploying Cloud App Security was detecting shadow IT,” says Erin Boris, Information Security Strategic Specialist at SLUHN. “Gaining that visibility through Cloud App Security helps us with software inventory, app rationalization, and most importantly, data loss prevention.”

As SLUHN continues to innovate on the edge of healthcare, its digital transformation has made a huge impact—in just 18 months. According to Nawrocki, there’s a palpable buzz as employees begin to work with Microsoft technologies that accommodate their needs in a demanding healthcare environment. “People are excited by what we want to accomplish with Microsoft and are looking to the future,” he concludes. “Working with Microsoft, it feels like the company is part of the St. Luke’s family, and that’s been an important success factor in our cloud journey so far.”

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Read more on St. Luke's Security chapter, St. Luke's Teams chapter, and St. Luke’s Critical Care chapter.