Customer Solution Case Study
Healthcare Provider Reduces Training Costs, Improves Communication with Portal Solution
Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Healthcare
Customer Profile
Norton Healthcare grew from a small community hospital in 1886 to become one of Kentucky's largest healthcare providers. It has more than 40 locations—including 5 hospitals—and 9,200 employees.
Business Situation
The organization needed an easy-to-use solution in order to share information more effectively and build stronger collaboration among caregivers and administrative employees.
Solution
Norton hired Quilogy’s National Healthcare Practice to develop and deploy an enterprise portal and learning management solution based on Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003.
Benefits
n Empowered business owners
n Improved decision making
n Preservation of existing investment
n Fifty percent reduction in training costs / “We expect to achieve payback on this system through the savings on training costs alone from using the learning management system through the SharePoint portal.”
Joseph DeVenuto, Vice President of Information Services, Norton Healthcare Systems
Norton Healthcare has grown from a small community hospital to greater Louisville’s leading healthcare provider with 5 hospitals, 7 Norton Immediate Care Centers, and 35 physician practice sites. That growth created a need for increased electronic communication, collaboration, and training. Working with Quilogy, Norton Healthcare addressed those needs with a new enterprise portal based on Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003. The intuitive user interface and flexibility provided by SharePoint Portal Server 2003 empowers business owners to publish and manage their own content, helps reduce IT costs, and preserves the company’s investment in existing applications. This solution also includes a new electronic learning management system based on the Quilogy Learning Platform, which Norton projects will reduce clinical system training costs by up to 50 percent.
Situation
From a faith-based healing hospital established in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1886, Norton Healthcare has grown to be one of Kentucky’s leading healthcare providers, with some of the most advanced technologies available and a dedicated group of physicians, nurses, and staff. Today, Norton Healthcare encompasses 5 hospitals, 7 Norton Immediate Care Centers, and 35 physician practice sites throughout greater Louisville and southern Indiana.
With more than 1,900 physicians, 3,200 nurses, and other medical and administrative staff, Norton Healthcare needed an efficient way to build stronger communications between management and employees and among caregivers. The organization had an internally developed intranet built on the ColdFusion platform. Adding content to that system required a developer or other technical resource, and the solution had no collaborative functionality. “They had no real way to form groups for planning sessions or to collaborate on projects,” says John Gootee, Managing Consultant for Quilogy. “It was just a place to post information.”
Even posting information was a challenge. With just one full-time IT person and two other part-time personnel dedicated to posting and maintaining content for all hospital departments, it could take several days for noncritical updates to be posted. As a result, the site was not regarded as a reliable resource for the most up-to-date information. In addition, employee surveys indicated that there was a communication gap between senior management and employees, which sometimes caused employees to duplicate efforts or created confusion about what efforts should be undertaken.
“That communication gap made us less effective as an organization,” says Joseph DeVenuto, Vice President of Information Services for Norton Healthcare Systems. “We wanted to be more collaborative and share more knowledge and information, but we couldn’t accomplish that with our existing solution.”
Another concern was training expenses. In 2003, Norton had implemented the Meditech Client/Server healthcare information system (HCIS) in two of its hospitals. At the time, the system required three days of training for the current nursing staff and new hires. That training generated significant overtime and temporary staffing costs to free up the staff to attend training sessions. Before it rolled out the HCIS system to its remaining three hospitals, Norton wanted to find a way to minimize those costs. “When we looked at continuing the rollout of the clinical system to two more hospitals in fall 2005, we knew we had to find a way to reduce that expense significantly,” says DeVenuto.
Solution
In late 2004, Norton launched the Enterprise Knowledge Management Initiative to improve its ability to make use of internal knowledge, disseminate best practices to caregivers, and progressively deliver compassionate, comprehensive care. The multiphase effort is focused on effectively sharing information and building collaboration among caregivers, administrative employees, patients, and the community through shared portals.
In August 2004, as Norton Healthcare was developing phase one of the Enterprise Knowledge Management Initiative, two of its IT directors attended a Microsoft Healthcare User Group conference in Redmond, Washington. At that conference they saw a presentation on the Microsoft Collaborative Health Initiative that brings together Microsoft® technologies and products to provide solutions specifically tailored to healthcare providers, health plans, and life sciences companies. Norton became interested in that initiative, especially in the collaborative possibilities of Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003, a component of Windows Server System™ integrated server software. The Norton IT directors were also introduced to Quilogy—a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner that serves a variety of enterprise and midmarket clients and offers solutions for multiple vertical industries including healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, and the public sector.
Following the conference, the Norton IT directors invited Quilogy’s National Healthcare Practice to make a presentation of its enterprise portal and electronic learning solutions. “After seeing Quilogy’s demo and talking to them about what we needed, we decided that SharePoint Portal Server was the direction we wanted to go,” says DeVenuto. Norton signed a contract with Quilogy on October 31, 2004.
Hiring Quilogy to develop and deploy its SharePoint Portal Server 2003-based solution enabled Norton to get the portal up and running in three months. “Quilogy brought the expertise and knowledge of SharePoint Portal Server to help us expedite the changeover from ColdFusion,” says DeVenuto.
As the first step in the changeover, Norton upgraded its infrastructure to Windows Server System components, including the Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 Enterprise Edition operating system and Exchange Server 2003. Then Quilogy deployed SharePoint Portal Server 2003 on an IBM dual processor xSeries server and deployed Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 on a quad-processor xSeries server computer.
The employee portal, launched in February 2005, provides a single entry point through which Norton medical staff and employees can easily search 1.5 million document files and critical human resources (HR) benefits information. They can also use it to access e-mail. Although much of the initial functionality of the portal was consistent with the previous intranet, the HR area offers a much broader collection of information and resources.
As part of the HR portal upgrade, Quilogy created new custom Web Parts within the Microsoft Windows® SharePoint Services technology in Windows Server 2003 to integrate the portal with the PeopleSoft HR system used by Norton. Now employees can access personalized benefits information such as 401(k) account details, sick leave, and vacation time from the main portal. Norton also created a custom Web Part to make ColdFusion applications available through the portal. In addition, standard Web Parts were used for everyday tasks such as announcements, shared workspaces, and access to document libraries and contact lists.
Before rolling it out, Norton pilot-tested the portal solution for 10 days with a group of about 40 individuals—including clinical, operations, and IT staff. “The biggest issue was that the rollout of the portal with the new infrastructure required the staff to use their domain account IDs and passwords to log on rather than the logons they used with the previous intranet,” says DeVenuto. “A lot of folks had forgotten their domain account information and some had never been assigned a domain account. Other than that there weren’t any major issues.”
The second phase of the Norton Healthcare Enterprise Knowledge Management Initiative, launched in May 2005, was deploying the electronic learning management system (LMS) built on the Quilogy Learning Platform.
The LMS provides Web-based training for about 4,000 Norton staff members—including nurses, physicians, radiology techs, lab techs, and hospital administration—on the Meditech HCIS system. The training is done in a Learning Center adjacent to the Norton downtown Louisville campus. Participants choose the modules they need and follow them at their own pace. Moderators are available in the room to answer any questions people may have about the system. Upon completing a training module, the attendees can immediately take the related test, and test results are automatically tracked in the PeopleSoft HR system.
In addition to training on the clinical system, Norton plans to use the LMS for safety training and other HR-related training required at various intervals.
Benefits
The launch of the new employee portal, based on SharePoint Portal Server 2003, is creating better communication within the organization through more frequent content refreshes. The intuitive user interface enables business owners to push out their own content, which results in fresher information for better decision making and significantly less IT development time. SharePoint Portal Server also is providing a reliable and cost-effective environment for e-learning, which Norton expects to help reduce its training costs by 50 percent.
Ease of Use Empowers Business Owners
Before Norton implemented SharePoint Portal Server, the various business groups would have to wait several days to have content posted or refreshed. “One of the problems with ColdFusion was that it required IT staff to post and refresh content, and we only had one person that we could dedicate to that task so it created a constant bottleneck,” says DeVenuto. “Posting content in the SharePoint environment is much easier so that the IT staff doesn’t have to be involved.”
Content posting is now handled by Norton business owners who can easily create and post their own content through the intuitive user interface. “Now there are 29 people responsible for posting content and 28 of those had never done it before,” says DeVenuto. “The business owners are happier because they can control their content and employees are getting news faster.” As a result, portal use is increasing rapidly, and communication and morale is improving throughout the organization. Demand for additional sites is growing as well.
“One of our measures of success is that more and more business owners want to create new sites on the SharePoint portal for their departments to communicate with their staff and with the organization as a whole,” says DeVenuto. “We’ve gone from 4 or 5 initial sites to 15 sites at the end of 4 months, and new requests are coming in on a regular basis.”
Improved Decision Making
The introduction of shared workspaces supports increased collaboration, which helps expedite decision making. Rather than passing around hard copy documents or sending multiple attachments to multiple recipients in e-mail, all stakeholders can review the same document in the same place and concur on the changes. “A single point of documentation gives us more consistency and helps us make better decisions,” says DeVenuto.
The portal also helps make senior leadership meetings more efficient by allowing meeting planners to post agendas and background documents prior to meetings. Those planning to attend can then review the information ahead of time so they can be prepared to discuss the relevant topics.
As more documents are posted to the Web, people are sending links to documents on the portal rather than sending files by e-mail, which results in less traffic and file volume on Exchange Server 2003.
Preservation of Existing Investments
Norton had made a significant investment in its ColdFusion applications, such as the Charge Description Master for looking at procedure charges, the employee directory, and policy and procedure documentation. It didn’t want to rebuild those applications for the new portal. With SharePoint Portal Server, all of the ColdFusion applications already in place remain intact. “Through the Windows Server platform single sign-on, we kept a bridge between the authentication module in their previous ColdFusion intranet and the Active Directory® service so they can access the ColdFusion applications from within the portal,” says Greg Aaron, Director of the National Healthcare Practice for Quilogy.
SharePoint Portal Server integration with Active Directory, which is part of the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 operating system, helps to increase security and simplify management because Norton can manage the portal within the same environment as the rest of its Windows Server 2003–based solutions.
Fifty Percent Reduction in Training Costs
Norton has found that its new learning management system, the Quilogy Learning Platform for SharePoint Portal Server 2003, has reduced training time for nurses from three days to two. Testing has shown that there is no decrease in competency between the instructor-led and Web-based training. And the reduction in the required training time is projected to reduce by 50 percent the healthcare network’s training costs for rolling out the clinical system to two of its three remaining hospitals.
“We expect to achieve payback on this system through the savings on training costs alone from using the learning management system through the SharePoint portal,” says DeVenuto.
The flexibility of this system will also help increase proficiency, since nurses can review any of the modules at any time and access the training from home through a virtual private network connection. This enables nurses to stay up-to-date on the clinical system, or refresh their knowledge of any aspect of that system, without having to wait for a course to be offered.
The next step for the LMS will be for Norton to offer nurses and physicians the continuing medical education (CME) training required to maintain their licenses. The LMS will provide the training and the assessment engine. For each user, it will also maintain a record of courses taken and test results, and it will produce a CME report that is sent to a state licensing board to help ensure compliance with licensing requirements.
Microsoft Windows Server System
Microsoft Windows Server System integrated server infrastructure software is designed to support end-to-end solutions built on the Windows Server operating system. Windows Server System creates an infrastructure based on integrated innovation, Microsoft's holistic approach to building products and solutions that are intrinsically designed to work together and interact seamlessly with other data and applications across your IT environment. This helps you reduce the costs of ongoing operations, deliver a more secure and reliable IT infrastructure, and drive valuable new capabilities for the future growth of your business.
For more information about Windows Server System, go to:
www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem