Call the doctor! How Teams is enabling better connections in the healthcare sector

FEATURE – Industry Innovation Article - Ergotron/Sektor

Few sectors have been challenged more in 2020 than healthcare. Around the world, the Covid-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc on emergency rooms and intensive care units, pushing medical staff to the edge. In New Zealand we’ve seen hospitals emptied as clerical staff were sent home and forced to run the hospital remotely. Technology is playing a significant role in enabling this to happen.

Since its inception, Microsoft has been working closely with the healthcare sector, helping it foster better collaboration and communication, provide greater access to healthcare services and enable more personalised care. The simple use of a collaboration tool like Microsoft Teams to coordinate different departments, or the use of AI and bots to provide automated online health services that are more effective and efficient all work together to drive the sector forward.

Ensuring nurses, doctors and medical staff are on the same page

In a fast paced hospital, or doctors surgery, access to the right technology system is imperative for medical staff to collaborate and make faster, more informed decisions. Microsoft Teams enables healthcare providers to continue to coordinate care in real-time. Instead of walking long hallways or traversing across multiple floors to find the right people they can connect via Teams Chat, with notifications sent to their smart phone or tablet so they can respond on the move. Or there is even the Walkie Talkie app, which allows a Teams enabled smart device to act like a two-way radio, where voice messages can be sent to an individual, or an entire group of people, just like an actual walkie talkie. It helps make it faster and easier to share secure health data too, documents are stored in the cloud via SharePoint and can be accessed and edited by all other team members instantly. This means less confusion and can lead to accelerated decision making and time-to-treatment.

It can also help care teams and support staff stay on top of rostering and administration. Teams streamlines complex care environments such as staff rostering and provides a central place for storing contact information. Knowing who is on shift and being able to reach them at the right time supports delivering timely patient care. Workers can also use Teams to ask for time off, swap shifts with other co-workers and let their manager know they are available for additional shifts, all on the go. Often, valuable time is spent trying to identify the correct contact information for healthcare staff members. Currently with targeted communications in Microsoft Teams, it offers the ability to manually create tags to organise users based on attributes such as a role, skill, or location. Once applied, you can message everyone assigned to a tag at the same time in a chat or channel conversation: for example, you can message all @obstetrics in a ward and the message is sent to everyone in that group.

Managers can also use Teams to ensure their staff are turning up to work on time and working in the right parts of the hospital. Time Clock with geo-detection capabilities allows managers to not just see when their team arrives, but also what station they are clocking in at.

Keeping on top of training and certifications is extremely important in the healthcare sector, which means doctors and nurses are continuously attending webinars and seminars to hear from industry experts about the latest guidance and best practice. Getting this advice used to require costly travel expenses and longer lead-times. Moreover, the opportunity to leverage the interaction with the expert(s) for future training or reference required additional work or investments. With an ad-hoc or scheduled Teams meeting, advice from experts can be gathered quickly, remotely, and keeping everyone safer. With high-quality video, recording, and transcript options, the content can also be leveraged as training or be added into a set of best practices.

Teams can also help keep staff on track and help monitor task progress in real-time. If a series of blood samples need to be taken away for testing, or new linen needs to be delivered to a particular part of the hospital, building managers at head office get instant visibility into what jobs have been done and what is outstanding. When tasks are logged in Teams a priority level and due date can be set, alongside notes for the job, any relevant files and then the job can be assigned to a specific team member, who receives a notification. If tasks aren’t being completed, management can make contact with the staff member involved, find out what is delaying the task, and help move the job along faster.

Using Teams to keep the healthcare sector moving

Across New Zealand there have been examples of healthcare providers using tools like Microsoft Teams to stay connected and keep the organisation moving. A great example of this comes from Canterbury District Health Board (CDHB). Providing hospital and community-based healthcare to more than 500,000 residents across Christchurch and rural Canterbury, CDHB is a critical resource for the region. The experience of the Christchurch earthquakes had given CDHB early insight into how it could build a more resilient system where access to patient data and the ability to collaborate were not reliant on access to buildings.

Learning from this pivotal event, CDHB embarked on an intensive digital transformation programme which was already well underway when COVID-19 hit. This enabled CDHB to deploy Microsoft Teams to 4,700 of its support staff and clinicians within days. As a result, CDHB’s Emergency Operations Centre could use Microsoft’s Blackboard platform and Teams Tasks features to swiftly coordinate the re-deployment of staff to manage the pandemic and set up Community Based Assessment Centres where needed.

The use of Microsoft Teams not only helped bridge the communication gap but allowed surgeons and GPs to continue learning and performing essential tasks. For example, in Christchurch, clinicians use Microsoft Teams for virtual multi-disciplinary meetings to consult on complex medical cases, reducing the amount of time and resources required and making the path to treatment more efficient. There are now plans underway across various regional DHBs to use applications like Microsoft Teams permanently for virtual appointments, so patients can book and attend consultations without having to travel. It’s the next step in the evolution of telehealth that will help address longstanding inequities of access to health services, make a patient’s entire journey through the health system much easier to monitor, and treatments easier to integrate and follow up.

The diagnosis for the future is looking good

As we look to the future of healthcare, Microsoft Teams will play an integral role in connecting patients with medical staff, and creating a resilient, robust, and modern healthcare system. In-person doctor visits can be challenging, especially for patients with mobility issues, a compromised immune system, or living in regional areas with a shortage of clinicians or healthcare facilities.

Through the use of the Microsoft teams clinicians are able to provide high-quality, personalised, and affordable consultations. Using the complete meetings platform in Microsoft Teams, combined with the new Bookings app, healthcare providers will be able to schedule, manage, and conduct virtual visits with patients, such as a surgery follow-up. Once a visit is scheduled within Microsoft Teams, the patient receives a customised email with appointment details and a link where they can join the virtual appointment from their web browser or Microsoft Teams mobile app.

To learn more about how Microsoft Teams can help your organisation, see the links below.

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