St. Luke’s Hospital responds to COVID-19 with Microsoft 365 and virtual command centers, improves treatment and saves lives

St. Luke’s has always embraced new technology, and this innovative mindset played an essential role in accelerating its response to the arrival of COVID-19. However, for the first time in St. Luke’s history, the network took advantage of business communication and collaboration tools to accelerate its response to the health crisis. Using Microsoft 365 to aid their efforts, employees improved treatment protocols for COVID-19, reduced mortality by 5 percent, sourced 100,000 masks, conserved personal protective equipment (PPE) with virtual rounds, and extended PPE resources with 3D printing and UV sterilization. They also virtually united patients with their families, made employees’ dreams come true with remote patient surveillance, worked with a lab to generate a 90-day test kit surplus, and reduced costs. 

Working with his colleagues, Chad Brisendine, Chief Information Officer at St. Luke’s University Health Network, used Microsoft Teams as the collaboration foundation for 22 virtual command centers—including one for each hospital, one for physicians, one for nurses, and one for the critical care team. Hundreds of employees collaborated in the virtual command centers to address every aspect of caring for COVID-19 patients. To support the clinical teams, Brisendine and his team also created eight operational command centers, covering logistics, safety, IT, infection, HR, labor resources, finance, and communications. Then they used Microsoft Power BI and Power Apps to surface data and track, report, and delegate issues within Teams, so employees could resolve problems as they arose—all of this in the first 48 hours of setting up the command centers.

Lighting up command centers coordinates response and save lives

How did Brisendine’s team achieve such a rapid response to COVID-19? “We didn’t sleep,” he says. “We acquired Microsoft 365 before the health crisis, but we hadn’t rolled it out fully. When COVID-19 hit, I was amazed at how quickly people learned the new tools. Within two days, we set up the command centers, so we were prepared to respond to the surge we knew was coming.” 

The network incident command center erased the 5,200 square miles that separate the network’s 12 hospitals in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. It provides a virtual space where operational and clinical leadership can connect without worrying about social distancing. Senior leaders, nursing executives, clinical staff—everyone uses Teams meetings to plan, moment by moment, the network’s response to COVID-19. 

“We didn’t need everyone to be in one physical location because we used Teams as a voice solution, with all the phone lines from the hospitals and departments coming into a single virtual command center number,” says Brisendine. “If necessary, the calls were routed to the appropriate operational command center. We had people discussing and solving clinical and operational issues all day every day: What’s our patient volume? How are our test turnaround times trending? Where are there PPE shortages? Where do we need more nurses?” 

In the first few days of the health crisis, physicians in the pulmonary and critical care department connected in Teams to gather data from ICU wards across the network and develop a new COVID-19 treatment protocol. “We reduced mortality by an absolute value of 5 percent below the national average of 18 to 20 percent,” says Douglas Corwin, MD, Pulmonary and Critical Care specialist at St. Luke’s University Health Network. “We also reduced the number of patients requiring intubation by 50 percent. Our ability to keep patients off the ventilator played an important role in improved survival. 

Staff at the hospitals built an app for Teams using Microsoft Power Apps, the low-code development solution in Microsoft Power Platform. Called the Issue Tracker app, it allows employees to submit data and requests for help—such as, “we need more ventilators,” or “we don’t have enough advanced practitioners,” or “there’s a pending medication shortage.” These requests light up a Power BI dashboard, also in Teams. Leaders monitoring the network corporate command center and the critical care team rely on the dashboard to report on trending issues and their resolution. 

For example, when employees working in the network corporate command center in Teams noted an increase in calls for more triage nurses in the Issue Tracker app, they knew they had a labor allocation problem at certain hospitals. To resolve the problem, they assigned the issue to employees monitoring the labor command center, who then reallocated nurses where they were most needed. 

“The critical care team and our organizational leadership depend on the Issue Tracker and Power BI dashboard to monitor every element of our operations moment by moment,” says Charlie Sonday, DNP, Medical Director of Informatics at St. Luke’s University Health Network. “Virtual collaboration in Teams means we are agile enough to help respond to issues where patients need our help the most.”

Improving PPE supplies reduces staff infection rate

When St. Luke’s first began treating COVID-19 patients in March 2020, the cost for PPE doubled and certain products became hard, or impossible, to find. Sourcing, distributing, and conserving PPE quickly became a priority to protect the health and safety of 16,000 St. Luke’s healthcare providers. Employees work together to optimize the supply chain for PPE using the logistics command center collaboration hub in Teams to source equipment from Korea, hand sanitizers from a local distillery, 20,000 masks from a company that usually makes uniforms for major league baseball, and more than 100,000 masks from community members. 

“We have a good supply of PPE because we use Teams for the logistics command center where staff work together and find alternative sources,” says Brisendine. “But we still had to track where, when, and how quickly the PPE was being used to comply with changing CDC regulations. We only had insight into inventory at the distribution centers. So, we created a PPE Inventory Tracker app in Teams using Power Apps.” 

Staff at 400 locations across the hospital network who manage inventory use the Inventory Tracker app on their smartphones to enter PPE data every day. Their data, along with information from St. Luke’s enterprise resource planning system, feed into a PPE tracking dashboard in Power BI that provides all the information St. Luke’s needs to ensure it has more than enough protective equipment. The dashboard also tracks the network’s inventory of testing equipment. When the dashboard revealed that St. Luke’s would run out of nasal swab test kits in 10 days, the lab team took on the challenge and, using Teams, connected virtually with a local partner, LabCorp. In just a few days, LabCorp had built enough test kits to inject a 90-day supply into St. Luke’s inventory. 

With better insight into inventory at the hospital floor level, it soon became obvious that St. Luke’s could reduce the risk of staff infection through mask sterilization and reuse. “We built 3D printed masks and then worked in Teams with Lehigh University to build a universal UV sterilization device to clean them after use,” says Brisendine. “The beauty of the outcome was St. Luke’s staff infection rate for COVID-19 was only 0.5 percent of all 16,000 employees, much lower than the national average of 12 to 15 percent.”

In the first few days of COVID-19, St. Luke’s employees pulled together in a network-wide response to the challenges of an unprecedented healthcare crisis. They used Microsoft 365 business productivity software in a clinical setting to improve patient care and health outcomes. “Teams is flexible, easy to use, and highly secure: three excellent traits for a tool you need in a hurry,” concludes Dr. Balshi. “Our rapid adoption of Teams for virtual command centers helped us stay ahead in the first difficult days of COVID-19. We used Teams to collaborate on strategies that kept staff safe, improved care and ultimately saved lives.” 

Find out more about St. Luke’s University Health Network on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Learn more about St. Luke’s University Health Network in the St. Luke’s virtual visits story and St. Luke’s Microsoft 365 case study.