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“Office SharePoint Server has improved our team members’ productivity by offering users a streamlined intranet experience and has enhanced team member relations by providing information important to them.” Alec Williams, Chief Information Officer, St.Vincent Heart Center of Indiana
When it opened in 2002, St.Vincent Heart Center of Indiana was the first freestanding hospital in Indianapolis to provide advanced treatment of cardiovascular disease. Until recently, the hospital used an HTML-based intranet to disseminate announcements, links, and other information to its 470 employees and 200 contract workers. Information on that system was difficult to find. With help from Crowe Chizek and Company, a Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner, the hospital deployed Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007 in November 2007. The new integrated and interactive solution provides easy access to information, enhances productivity, improves communication, and supports increased security for confidential information. In a March 2008 survey, 87 percent of St.Vincent Heart Center of Indiana team members and contractors who completed the survey responded favorably to the new solution.
Situation
St.Vincent Heart Center of Indiana (SVHCI), a 120-bed facility, is one of 17 hospitals in the St.Vincent Health system in Indiana. The hospital employs 470 people and has an additional 200 contract employees. Founded in 2002, the facility has been ranked the number one provider of cardiac care in Indiana for the past three years by the leading healthcare ratings company in the United States, HealthGrades. Additionally, SVHCI has been recognized as a Top 100 Cardiovascular Program by Thomson Reuters, a company that uses the industry’s management and clinical outcomes to rate the highest hospital performers in the nation. The hospital is consistently in the upper percentile for patient satisfaction as rated by Press Ganey, a healthcare performance measurement and
improvement company. SVHCI team members had relied on an intranet that was created within an existing dashboard software program to communicate and find information including phone directories, clinical forms, and handbooks on policies and procedures. That intranet was difficult and time-consuming to use because it required users to scroll through all posted messages to find the information they were looking for. In addition, outdated information had to be deleted manually. “We had a lot of information on the intranet, which was somewhat disorganized and confusing. We had everything from our café menu, newsletters, and pictures of events to important information that department managers needed to disseminate to team members,” explains Elizabeth Cisco, Vice
President of Marketing and Development at SVHCI. “Users didn’t know where to begin, and they didn’t know what was important and what wasn’t. We needed a solution that would create an enhanced communications tool that was more robust, was easier to navigate, and was interactive.” Additionally, anyone with an e-mail account at the hospital had access to all intranet postings, even information meant only for the members of a particular team. “The intranet didn’t have a lot of security levels or permissions built into it—everyone using it had access to virtually everything,” says Jane Richardson, Vice President of Human Resources at SVHCI. In a team member survey conducted annually by SVHCI Human Resources, Richardson says that every year, “Communication was one of the top issues that team members identified as needing improvement. They noted that the existing intranet wasn’t providing effective two-way communication.” SVHCI wanted to replace its intranet with a central portal that would improve communication and productivity by making it easy to publish and find information. The hospital also sought a solution that would streamline content management, organize the great diversity of content, and increase security by supporting customized permission levels.
Solution
The SVHCI Marketing department decided in February 2006 to improve how the hospital disseminated information. After the Marketing department met with IT staff, it became clear that the need for an improved intranet was essential to all areas of the hospital, in particular to the clinical areas where nurses and other medical staff work. St.Vincent Heart Center of Indiana hired Crowe Chizek and Company, a nationwide consulting firm and Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner specializing in professional services and technology solutions, to help a committee analyze the existing intranet and design the new solution. “The committee completed a detailed assessment of what SVHCI business requirements were and what would be needed in a new platform,” says Ken Ruiz, Sales Executive at Crowe Chizek. “We mapped out everything from content management to business workflow.” The committee considered moving to an externally hosted Web site. It also evaluated software solutions including IBM FileNet and Hyland OnBase. In January 2007, the committee decided to use Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007. “We looked at other available solutions and found that SharePoint Server 2007 provided the functionality and collaboration tools SVHCI needed in a cost-effective model,” says Ruiz. Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides a single solution for facilitating collaboration, managing content, implementing business processes, and supplying the information that is essential to an organization’s goals and processes. The software also works with Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003, which SVHCI currently uses. The hospital has been upgrading to the 2007 release of the Microsoft Office system in phases. Once that deployment is complete, users will be able to interact with SharePoint sites without leaving their Microsoft Office programs and to have two-way synchronization with collaborative information and documents. In March 2007, six departments were selected to participate in the first phase of the Office SharePoint Server 2007 deployment: Education, Human Resources, IT, Marketing, Quality/Safety/Risk, and Pharmacy. Those departments, which had published the most content on the former intranet, updated and moved their information to the new Office SharePoint Server 2007 portal. A pilot test of the new solution began in September 2007. The pilot was conducted over two months, during which time only committee members could access the site. Working with Ruiz and Crowe Chizek IT staff, committee members evaluated the new site’s usability and made suggestions about what libraries and categories should be included. The new intranet, named Online Source of Communication and Resources (OSCAR), was launched to all SVHCI hospital team members in November 2007. It includes a home page with announcements and links to important information, such as the physician on call, and to the portals of the six departments involved in the first phase of deployment. Another link on the OSCAR home page provides access to a clinical dashboard that the hospital calls “My Heart Matters”—a portal through which clinicians and physicians can access patient data and other resources related specifically to patient care. At an open house introducing the new solution, the hospital’s team members learned how to take advantage of the new features in Office SharePoint Server 2007. Additional sessions included in-service training for nurses conducted by the Education department. “Once we did all of the orientations for Office SharePoint Server 2007 and everyone became familiar with it, we heard nothing but positive feedback from our team members,” says Stephanie Mabe, Administrator of SharePoint and Education and Communication Specialist at SVHCI. According to a recent survey, 95 percent of SVHCI team members who completed the survey reported OSCAR is “easy to access.” The majority said information, such as clinical forms, the phone directory, announcements, and on-call physicians, was easily retrieved.
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