Transforming Healthcare Communications with Microsoft Teams

Introduction

How Healthcare organisations can reduce time to treatment by migrating voice services to Microsoft Teams.

Today, many healthcare organisations face a split between their voice platform and their digital communication systems.

So, for example, voice resides on legacy technology, sometimes cloud-based but often on-premise, poorly integrated into the organisation’s other systems. That’s bad news for the health organisation as it slows down their all-important digital transformation. It’s also bad news for the health workers who are working less efficiently with out-of-date communication solutions. And it’s even worse news for the patients who, as a result, face longer waiting times to treatment.

This information looks at how your healthcare organisation can move beyond this split between voice and other systems. It will guide you on the best ways to bring all your communications together onto modern cloud- based collaboration tools that give you new advantages in agility and patient insight.

We will describe the practical steps required to make this happen and outline the methodology that has helped other leading healthcare organisations integrate their voice communications into their overall business and enterprise workflow systems.

Voice Matters

Voice is the most important real-time communication channel as it results in more efficient and faster decision making. It is also often the main way healthcare organisations communicate with their patients, enabling them to resolve problems quickly and decisively.

No organisation can afford to keep its voice communications on outdated, and in some cases unsupported, technology, isolated from all the other communication channels that you now rely on.

Over the last decade, voice has been supplemented with new channels including messaging and video for both internal and external communications.

At the same time, collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams have brought new capabilities, knowledge management, and workgroup collaboration. Microsoft Teams helps healthcare professionals and information workers operate more effectively and rapidly.

Introducing Resonate Teams for Health

Resonate’s Teams for Health package is an easy and affordable way to ensure your organisation is making the most of Microsoft Teams and all its enabling features. We can certainly help you realise its full potential in terms of voice, with all your doctors, clinicians, nurses and admin staff able to use their smart phone as a single replacement for all the other communication devices in their life, including pagers, walkie-talkies and desk phones.

A key advantage of integrated workflow and communications systems, such as Microsoft Teams, is that group members can work from any location and yet still be fully effective and in touch with all team activities and projects.

Since the onset of Covid-19, the ability for all team members to work effectively from home has been essential for organisations in every sector, as well as healthcare. As Covid-19 recedes, it’s likely that many clinicians and other staff will continue to work from their homes for some part of the week. While some aspects of healthcare depend on personal contact, there are others that can quite easily and efficiently be carried out remotely via Teams.

Given how integrated healthcare professional and patient communications have become with team workflow and knowledge management systems, integrating voice into unified communications has become essential, especially as more and more of your employees will be spending more time working remotely.

Teams Direct Routing

For organisations that use Microsoft Teams, it is now possible to completely replace legacy voice systems with full telephony features in Teams. Available solutions, such as Resonate’s Voice for Teams platform, include a comprehensive, enterprise- grade product that provides full telephony functionality with service levels 24x7x365 for the largest enterprises.

Such solutions provide a globally available, feature-rich platform that is proactively monitored for voice quality and possesses unparalleled security.

They are ideal for organisations that are looking to retire legacy or PBX solutions, migrate from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams for telephony, Office 365 users who want to enable the telephony functionality of Teams, or companies looking to enhance and simplify communications for workgroups working remotely.

Resonate, for example, has delivered Microsoft voice solutions at scale across a range of industries, including healthcare. For one customer alone we manage 150,000 users in over 1,000 sites across 50 countries.

In another project, a Microsoft voice solution resulted in cost savings of 60%; significant improvements in collaboration, mobility and flexible working; improved knowledge management and business intelligence; realisation of new technologies such as industrial workplace augmented reality (AR); and voice integration with core enterprise business systems.

Endpoint Mapping

Healthcare organisations need an approach that is based on a focused methodology with defined benefits that are tracked and monitored throughout the migration process.

To capture the considerable potential cost savings and efficiencies that moving voice communications to Teams can realise, you need to clearly understand the features and functionality of your legacy voice estate. These are then mapped to the equivalent functions within Teams.

This mapping process, done correctly, allows customers to optimise their savings and greatly reduces cost of change and project timelines.

The endpoint mapping methodology should be designed to simplify the customer journey to unified communications with Teams through a clear roadmap that identifies difficulties, challenges and opportunities from the outset.

At the heart of the best solutions on the market is the concept of endpoint mapping and management. In today’s workplace, endpoints have become increasingly diffuse and difficult to track. With Covid-19 disrupting expectations of where different members of the team are located, that confusion has only increased. Mapping voice endpoints is essential to smooth migration, avoiding disruption, and obtaining rapid returns from the migration from legacy voice to comprehensive unified enterprise communications.

With virtual consultations and hybrid working practices with some members of the team working from home and other frontline teams in hospitals or clinics, there is an increased strain on the system and the need for improved practices to successfully manage the confusing range of voice outputs.

Hybrid Working with Teams Voice

With Resonate’s Team for Health package, you could easily migrate to cloud telephony and communication with Teams and still retain your 088 dial-in number and all the individual dial-up numbers of all your employees.

This will save a significant amount on the investment and maintenance costs of the legacy telephone exchange, the internal walkie talkie network, in-house paging and DECT network.

With one Teams app and one enterprise smartphone, all desk phones, mobile phones, DECT devices, walkie talkies and pagers can be replaced, making life easier and communication more seamless for your doctors, clinicians, nurses, and other staff.

Enhanced Team Collaboration

Collaboration within clusters of workgroups requires a form of communication between colleagues and executives that promotes swift interaction and sharing of work instructions, situation photos or videos, daily start-up meetings and work transfer.

Legacy communication systems can slow down collaboration and lead to dissatisfaction among employees and managers.

Another great feature of Resonate Teams for Health, APP’ing is a social media tool that promotes fast communication within workgroups. No more email, but quick apps with short texts to ask questions, share information and prioritise emergency messages.

Calling to extensions internally or call out or receive calls are embedded in the APP. Having daily stand-up meetings with all existing and working-from-home colleagues through video calling and videoconference is a standard part of the APP and the Teams Hub.

Sharing work instructions, access to work schedules and seeing if colleagues are available for contact is safe and easy within the team bubble and without half the hospital interfering with this via cc’s or bcc’s. This inspires confidence in the team and increases communication speed.

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e-Health

Since the pandemic and the scaling down of clinic appointments, many healthcare organisations have discovered the application of virtual patient contact with video calling and sometimes also sending ‘GDPR unsafe’ WhatsApp communication.

For those clinic appointments for which no physical action is required, eHealth is a new method, introduced as part of our Teams for Health package, that can be deployed. It protects patient data in alignment with NEN7510 rulings by the Teams hub in a structured manner. Microsoft encourages e-Health by making the Teams app available to consumers for free.

Resonate supports, integrates and guides the new virtual clinic video calls and secure instant messaging between patients and care teams. We also arrange the application and award of eHealth innovation subsidies by the Healthcare department to which the various participating clinics can claim their share since 2021.

Admin and Authorisation

The strength of the Teams hub is that all patient communication moments can be automatically recorded in a log file. Based on the patient’s phone number and email address, Teams consults the Electronic Patient records and keeps a log file.

This can be used for automatic reporting and substantiation of delivered care production contact hours to insurance offices. The healthcare professionals only need to focus on the online consultation without the administration burden. In addition, Teams offers the healthcare professional the opportunity to, for example, record a video call with a patient and add it to the patient file for medical reporting afterwards.

The execution of certain medical actions requires the knowledge and consent of the team leader or head of department. The Teams APP from Resonate offers the option to employees to submit an authorisation request and to executives to approve or reject it from within the app. All authorisation requests are automatically logged for management reporting and inspection purposes.

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Process

The simplest, most obvious enterprise voice endpoints are items such as desk phones, ATA adapters, or conference phones. Increasingly, endpoints can also be found in software environments. Softphones and UC clients can give healthcare workers ways to communicate through any hardware devices that might be present, including desktop computers, smartphones, laptops, tablets, or even stand-alone workplace headsets. These ‘soft’ endpoints can be physically in an office but can also be home-based or mobile.

Typically, healthcare organisations will have a mix of voice technologies connecting these endpoints to a PBX, ranging from hard-wired, including analogue lines, emergency phones, as well as IP, soft endpoints, Wi-Fi and DECT.

With a solution like Resonate’s Teams for Health, a unique data collection and analysis process assists in endpoint mapping. This will provide templates and methods for capturing information on all active connections and mapping them to Microsoft Teams.

Resonate have evolved this process over many years and have proved and refined it in action, addressing over 500 sites using this methodology.

We have the capability to analyse site data and define personas, establishing Design Ground Rules, assigning correct connection types, and identifying questionable connections for further interrogation.

Our solution creates Teams Endpoint Mapping (TEMAP) output for each site and we review the document with the site contact for agreement. They will then make adjustments as required and agree on the final design.

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Benefits of Resonate Teams for Health

Moving voice communications to a comprehensive unified communications solution within Microsoft Teams can achieve major cost savings. It also integrates all colleague and patient communications channels on a single, cloud-based platform that is available to your doctors, clinicians, nurses, and other staff, wherever they are in the world.

Resonate have developed an advanced, comprehensive solution that is designed to allow healthcare organisations of every size to move their voice channels onto Teams efficiently and rapidly to realise the major process and cost advantages this can bring.

Resonate’s Teams for Health enables hybrid working with secure and seamless collaboration and communications between team members, with simplified admin and authorisation, making patient care faster and more efficient.

With OnePhone, all Teams Apps are activated with Teams Voice and enable your health teams to replace all communication devices such as desk phones, mobile phones, pagers and walkie-talkies with a single smart phone and just one sign on.

Teams Voice can be linked to your legacy PBX system, enabling you to keep all extension numbers the same.

The BMC fire alert feature is associated with Teams Flow App. In addition to the current control stations, alarms can go directly to the Teams App of the relevant groups.

Our solution has been developed and enhanced over many years. Today, we can offer it to healthcare organisations that want to move all their communications onto a modern, advanced platform and take advantage of the features and enhanced capabilities of enterprise unified communications.

If you would like to discuss our Teams for Health package and benefit from our extensive experience, we would be happy to talk you through how we could help your business.

Resources

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