Keeping people healthy during a pandemic, AllWays Health Partners deploys telehealth services to network providers using Microsoft Teams

“I visited a thriving primary care practice run by a husband-and-wife team and saw firsthand their packed waiting room, yet they were worried they would have to close the office down,” says Murphy. “There were hundreds of similar clinics across rural Massachusetts, all concerned about a flood of patients and the ongoing threat of transmission.” 

Back at the office, Murphy discussed the situation with her colleague, Mark McCormick, Chief Operating Officer at AllWays. In keeping with the company’s 30-year history of innovation and exceptional customer service, AllWays quickly developed a customized telehealth solution based on Microsoft Teams, the collaboration hub in Microsoft 365. Called AllWays on Teams, the solution uses Microsoft Bookings for virtual visits and is available to all providers contracted with AllWays Health Partners. 

“There was no time to lose, given the escalating situation with COVID-19,” says McCormick. “We wanted to deliver a highly secure platform for virtual consultations that would help independent providers, who were going to lose millions of dollars in revenue, to stay open when they were desperately needed.” 

In less than four days AllWays rolled out the solution, and by mid-May 2020 more than 475 health providers had conducted more than 5,000 telehealth sessions over Teams. “Kudos to our internal IT and network management teams and to our Microsoft account team for getting the job done extra fast—our members needed access to care from their providers and many of those providers needed a trusted platform to get started,” says McCormick.

Keeping primary care practices open during the pandemic  

Before AllWays could move forward with its new telehealth solution, it had to ensure compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). The Microsoft 365 environment is HIPAA-compliant and Office 365 is also HITRUST certified. AllWays had already signed a Business Associate Agreement with Microsoft. However, the solution required a separate Teams environment for each provider practice to help ensure all information exchanged between clinicians and patients remained private, including chats. Working with Microsoft, AllWays created a separate Office 365 tenant, or logical grouping of users, for AllWays on Teams. Each provider within the tenant is designated as a separate practice. 

“We really had to think through with our Microsoft team how to deploy a compliant, streamlined Teams experience for each provider practice,” says McCormick. “Given the security concerns that we had with other platforms, Teams was perfect for the job. And we are very comfortable with the Microsoft 365 security infrastructure that we already have in place.” 

Once the AllWays on Teams solution was ready, Murphy and her team created an outreach plan, put together a call to action, and created a user guide for the solution. Next, they hosted an educational webinar. “I’ve been involved in many software rollouts, and this was a smooth experience,” says Murphy. “The providers were eager to take it up. We offer ongoing webinars on how to set up the solution, troubleshoot issues, and bill for virtual appointments. Many of the providers were conducting televisits that same day.” 

The solution is simple, even for patients who are not tech-savvy. After the patient books an appointment with the provider, they get an invitation via email with a link to the Teams meeting at the appointed time. “These independent practices weren’t doing virtual bookings before COVID-19, but today they use AllWays on Teams to care for patients in this time of crisis,” says McCormick. “Within two months of launching, we had 5,000 telehealth claims from providers using AllWays on Teams to care for patients.” 

Without a virtual visit solution, independent providers might have had to close their practices. When that happens, patients may have no alternative but to visit an urgent care clinic or a local hospital’s emergency room. ER visits are often pricey for patients—and at capacity with COVID patients. “We have a robust network of independent providers, and we didn’t want to see their practices come to a grinding halt,” says Murphy. “With Teams, we provided them with a good solution to a very pressing problem. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. People were thrilled with the reliability of the platform and impressed by the video quality.”

Growing the business from the living room

AllWays quickly facilitated this new service during the pandemic with everyone working from their homes. Building the service on the fly has opened everyone’s eyes to the value of a virtual teamwork solution. “The whole setup with Teams was so easy,” says Murphy. “We had daily check-in calls with IT to collaborate on the telehealth solution. We conducted the introductory webinars on Teams, and we used the chat feature to let people ask questions, which we used to develop an FAQ for our website.” 

The transition to remote work was a non-event, according to McCormick, thanks to the company’s early adoption of Microsoft 365 as the foundation for a more efficient cloud-first workplace. “Ever since we moved to Microsoft 365, we’ve had almost 100 percent remote work capability through the Office 365 platform and its built-in security infrastructure,” says McCormick. “We didn’t miss a beat when we all moved home to work.” 

Supporting new business goals with modern workplace tools 

Back in 2017, the company’s IT team made a conscious decision to accelerate the use of a standard suite of cloud tools in Microsoft 365. At that time, the company shifted from a primarily Medicaid health plan to a full-service health plan and accelerated the expansion of its provider network. A new set of modern tools was needed to support the company’s goal to contract and onboard thousands of new provider practices. 

“Microsoft 365 is the perfect platform for digital transformation because everybody knows how to use the tools, and they understand the interaction among the products,” says Murphy. “Microsoft technology makes it easier for our staff to participate in the digital transformation because they are starting with the tools they know.” 

The AllWays on Teams solution is a perfect example of the business value of Microsoft 365. While the pandemic was the catalyst—and a proof point of business agility in a time of crisis—AllWays had been thinking about a telehealth solution to grow its independent provider network for a while. Murphy had been tracking a rise in visits to urgent care facilities and the commensurate increase in healthcare costs. She and McCormick had talked about ways to provide independent providers with a telehealth solution to mitigate these costs and enable family practitioners to treat their patients during out-of-office hours. With AllWays on Teams, their plans came to fruition at a time when they were needed most. 

To date, more than 500 independent providers have signed up for the telehealth service. “We have a goal of helping members get the care they need at the site that is best able to deliver it,” says McCormick. “Telehealth opens up new streams of revenue for providers who can offer telehealth services for patients after hours or on the weekend and drive down the cost of care in the long run.” 

“And our role in the future could be helping these practices work more efficiently in an administrative sense using Teams,” adds Murphy. “There are lots of ways we can support independent providers now that they’ve had experience with virtual collaboration and see the benefits. It’s exactly what we had been planning for.”

Delivering insights based on real-time business data 

One of the first things McCormick did when he became Chief Operating Officer was to promote Microsoft Power BI. He quickly achieved wide adoption of the cloud-based business intelligence tool within the operations department, where employees took advantage of user-friendly dashboards for objectives and operational key results (OKR) analysis. “Microsoft technology has been a big part of keeping our costs low. We standardized dashboard deployment on Power BI, which has enabled us to deliver insights more quickly and at a lower resource cost. Today, the majority of our staff use Power BI dashboards in one form or another.“ 

For example, AllWays developed a Power BI dashboard within Teams for its board of directors to demonstrate how well the company is performing on six key objectives. One objective is to improve the accuracy of the new member signup process. Each department has a series of dashboards that rolls up to each OKR. “These dashboards have really improved the board’s understanding of the multiple functions that a health plan manages,” explains McCormick. “A good example is the near-term statistics we’re providing the board to illustrate what’s happening to our business since COVID-19. In the first part of the pandemic, we saw a dramatic drop of 37 to 41 percent in provider calls to our call center and a reduction of 51 percent in claims because hospitals were setting aside capacity to treat patients with the virus. Providing transparency into those metrics helped us to make accurate decisions sooner rather than later.” 

And when it comes to responding to customers’ queries, AllWays now has plenty of data to prove that it’s maintaining service level agreements. “We’re using Power BI to communicate just how efficient we are at paying claims, which does cut through some of the misconceptions out there,” says Murphy. “We can show customers in minutes that claims were processed within three days, and if not, why not. For example, sometimes providers submit them incorrectly. It enables us to provide more lines of sight, which is a great way to solidify customer relationships.” 

Improving financial accuracy and policy compliance with COVID-19 policies

Since introducing Microsoft 365 to the workplace, AllWays has improved efficiency using Microsoft Power Platform, which includes Microsoft Power Automate, to streamline onerous workflows. Using the streamlined workflows that the IT team created with Power Automate, employees within the Finance department—who work through audit cycles, monthly and quarterly closing cycles, and many manual tasks—now close the books more efficiently. 

Due to AllWays’ experience with Power Automate, the company was well prepared to adjust its processes to respond to the onset of COVID-19. For example, if a group health plan was unable to pay its premiums due to furloughed employees or a temporary closure, AllWays created a new workflow on its employer portal to process requests. “We wanted to support our sponsors during these difficult times, so we used Power Automate to develop a form they can fill out to request premium payment flexibility,” says Yogendra Bundela, Director of DevOps at AllWays Health Partners. “Their request is routed through sales, finance, billing, and collection to create a customized response for each customer.” 

And when the Massachusetts Division of Insurance (DOI) and MassHealth (Medicaid) stipulated payment and benefit policy changes during the pandemic—including a more robust use of telehealth and simplified reimbursement processes—AllWays was able to quickly comply using its new streamlined business processes. “When the DOI issues a bulletin, we use Power Automate to build workflows to prove that we’re correctly interpreting and executing the new policies,” says Bundela. “We show the intake of the bulletin, what conclusions we reached about its implementation, and how the directives are passed to the business areas.” 

As AllWays navigates this unprecedented time, the company is reaping the benefits of foresight in modernizing its workplace. With cloud-based tools that support reliable remote teamwork, the company was able to put new business strategies in place during the pandemic—and help providers ranging from large hospitals to small independent practices provide more care to more people when they need it the most.

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