The Joint Commission<\/a> has concluded that there are two key barriers standing in the way of safer care: culture change and one-size-fits-all solutions that fit few because each unit and facility can have unique root causes and contributing factors to safety issues.\u00a0 And so we\u2019re teaming closely with the DNV-GL to transform every affiliate of Advocate Health Care into a high reliability organization by removing those two barriers.\u00a0 Office 365 is helping us remove those barriers in several ways.\u00a0 First, we\u2019ve built High Reliability Leader (HRL) rounding dashboards with SharePoint and embedded PowerBI reports on process and safety baselines and improvements in those dashboards.\u00a0 Our HRLs capture safety and variability issues across departments and sites in Excel by issue, unit, director, date, and time.\u00a0 Feeds from each unit roll up into PowerBI PowerPivot reports in the HRL rounding dashboard so that both leaders and teams can see their performance relative to other units and their progress over time against themselves as well as others.\u00a0 Beyond just the value of insights on high reliability-related events alone, these dashboards have helped us establish a top to bottom organizational culture of relentless process improvement, agility, and laser focus on reducing variability.\u00a0 The second way that Office 365 is helping us is in overcoming the one-size-few barrier because it\u2019s easy to adapt PowerBI, SharePoint, Excel, and Skype for Business to meet the unique process improvement needs down to the unit and even team level.<\/p>\nHand hygiene compliance is one of those absolute requirements for us in our journey toward high reliability.\u00a0 According to the CDC, one in every 25 patients still contracts a hospital acquired infections during a hospital stay and yet so many of these could be prevented with simple hand washing, which still only happens about 50% of the time at the national level.\u00a0 Driving hand hygiene compliance across an organization like Advocate Health Care, with more than 250 sites of care and acute-care hospitals, requires a hand hygiene enforcement and tracking solution that can not only scale across every facility but also adapt to the unique needs and contributing factors for hand hygiene non-compliance of each unit and facility.\u00a0 To do this, we\u2019ve used PowerBI and PowerPivot to track and enforce hygiene compliance across the enterprise with our Speedy Audit application.\u00a0 Observers at the various sites enter their compliance observations, how many times the clinician washed or sanitized their hands per patient interactions, for example, into the Speedy Audit app.\u00a0 All of that data is rolled up into PowerPivot to enable us to track compliance by clinician, by unit, by month, and see up or downward trends. Feedback to the units and clinicians is immediate \u2014 which creates just in time education opportunities and broad awareness that this is a non-negotiable clinician performance requirement.\u00a0 Plus, since we\u2019ve recorded our in-person training courses with Skype for Business our education and ongoing training is available on-demand to anyone at their convenience.<\/p>\n
Our residency programs are using SharePoint to proactively manage the handoff process between shift teams.\u00a0 Each resident ends their shift by signing off on a checklist for each patient that includes status of each patient, test results pending, what needs to be done, signs to watch for, quality checklist items, specialists involved, and anything the incoming team should be aware of.\u00a0 This reduces the risk of errors and delays related to things like missed warning signs that incoming residents weren\u2019t alerted to, action items agreed to verbally but never completed, important data points scribbled down but never communicated, and overlooked messages buried the forest of others in the EHR.\u00a0 This SharePoint handoff checklist is reducing length of stays and keeping patients from falling through the cracks during the single most critical times of the day during their in-patient stay.<\/p>\n
How to remove waste and inefficiencies<\/h3>\n
Schmuland:<\/strong> With downward pressures on pricing and volumes colliding with rising operating costs every health system executive I talk to is looking for new and innovative ways to remove waste and inefficiencies. Most have squeezed out as much as they can from their supply chains and are now looking for new ways to improve clinician productivity, team communication, collaboration and performance, and take out costs and waste. Is Office 365 helping you innovative in any of these areas? Any surprising innovations from the frontline?<\/p>\nClouser:<\/strong> PowerBI has produced a few of those surprising inefficiency-removing innovations for us.\u00a0 Insights and reports that used to take days to weeks can now be delivered and put to use in minutes to hours. But even more important, we\u2019re able to use that data to optimize the use of the limited resources we have. Take, for example a simple case like knowing where and how our interpretive services are actually needed versus actual utilization across the enterprise. There are never enough interpreters so we have to make sure that they are being optimally used 100% of the time. With PowerBI we know precisely what interpreter interactions are occurring by languages, by patient, age, gender, ethnicity, by location, by time, and by unit. For example, behavioral health is currently our top unit utilizer and signing is our top language. The need is high for sign language and having the data and information to support this helps us match the resource to the need.<\/p>\nAnother surprising innovation that\u2019s enabled us to optimize the use of the limited resources we have is using Skype for Business video conferencing between the staff intensivists at our eICU central facility and the ICUs of some of the smaller hospitals. By equipping our eICUs with one-click videoconferencing, our intensivists can hold inter-disciplinary rounds on the ICU patients at any hospital without needing to get in a car and drive there. This innovative practice allows for us to hold these rounds regularly which are necessary in order to ensure quality, coordinated, and safe care is maintained with our ICU patients. These rounds also ensure that the patient care plans are up to date and the patient is on the quickest and safest path to discharge from the unit.<\/p>\n
And within our own IT department, we\u2019ve leveraged SharePoint to drive out waste and inefficiencies in how we manage our IT contracts. We\u2019ve configured auto-notifications, workflows and the content management features in SharePoint to eliminate the need to manually track renewals and, as a result of that, are able to be proactive in reviewing and renegotiating contracts well in advance of their expiration dates. Having this visibility in a centralized tool also allows everyone interacting with each vendor to contribute their feedback and asks well in advance of the re-negotiation process. This alone has improved our negotiating positions and also enabled us to get more out of our contractors with each renewal.<\/p>\n
How to integrate<\/h3>\n
Schmuland:<\/strong>\u00a0What has your experience been like with integrating Office 365 with other applications and with outside entities that you partner with or share risk with? Has Office 365 made it easier for you to communicate and collaborate with outside organizations? Any surprise innovations here?<\/p>\nClouser:<\/strong> Skype for Business has been a driver for collaboration and communication both within and outside the organization and we continue to see our clinical and support staff users find innovative ways to use the tool. As a starter we have federated our Skype for Business solution with our EMR vendor, Cerner Corporation, as well as Microsoft, which really extends the team and support for the products. Our Cerner technology is remote hosted with the vendor and having access to the Cerner support and implementation teams enables us to move at a faster pace. In addition to the vendor community we have federated with other health systems who are utilizing our eICU program. In this scenario the federation of Skype for Business allows our clinicians to communicate asynchronously for non-urgent updates. This communication allows care givers at both sites to minimize interruptions which is a known contributing factor to safety issues.\u00a0 In the future we are looking to integrate our Skype for Business solution to our Cisco Telepresence rooms extending the reach of video conferencing to the desktop. Overall, we feel like we\u2019re at the very beginning of this journey to collaboration-enable our enterprise and continue to be very excited about the next wave of innovations that our associates will dream up with Skype for Business.<\/p>\nWhat are your thoughts? Let us know via\u00a0email<\/a>,\u00a0Facebook<\/a>, or\u00a0Twitter<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Dennis Schmuland, Chief Health Strategy Officer at Microsoft shares part 3 of his 4 part collaboration-enabled healthcare enterprises series.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":206,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1507],"post_tag":[],"content-type":[1483],"coauthors":[979],"class_list":["post-1456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-healthcare","content-type-thought-leadership"],"yoast_head":"\n
Collaboration-enabled healthcare enterprises \u2013 Part 3 - Microsoft Industry Blogs<\/title>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\n