Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Workflow System Speeds Approval Process for Business Trips and Lecture Engagements
Overview
Country or Region:Germany
Industry:Healthcare
Customer Profile
Based in Hanover, Germany, the Hanover Medical School (MHH) is one of that country’s leading university medical centers. With almost 6,400 employees, MHH treated more than 200,000 patients in 2007.
Business Situation
MHH needed to review increasing numbers of applications for outside engagements for potential conflicts of interest. Incomplete applications, missing documents, and followups delayed the process.
Solution
MHH used Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 and the 2007 Microsoft Office suites to standardize, simplify, and accelerate the approval process.
Benefits
Streamlined workflows
Easy adoption
Flexibility
Enhanced collaborative environment / “Everything pointed to using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. We did something in three months that we hadn’t been able to accomplish in two years.”
Michael Born, Director, Human Resources and Legal Departments, Hanover Medical School
At the Hanover Medical School (MHH), one of Germany’s leading university medical centers, the number of requests for approving business trips, lecture engagements, and cooperation with industry was rising sharply while the number of employees in the Human Resources and Legal departments to review the requests was shrinking. To simplify and accelerate the application process, the hospital developed a workflow system using Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 to guide doctors through applications, check them for completeness, and display their status. Users no longer have to search for documents or spend time responding to inquiries about the status of applications. MHH has implemented the workflow system in other areas of the medical center to make operations faster, simpler, and more transparent.
Situation
The Hanover Medical School (MHH) has a staff of 6,400 employees, including 1,100 doctors and 1,300 nurses. In recent years, the number of patients, the extent of research, and the amount of third-party research funding at MHH have all increased sharply. In 2007, MHH delivered care to almost 51,000 inpatients and 160,000 outpatients, and between 2006 and 2007, research funding from scientific organizations, businesses, and foundations grew by 17.6 percent to €60.7 million (U.S.$82.5 million).
One result of this growing funding success is that MHH staff began receiving more and more invitations to deliver lectures or attend other speaking and business engagements. The Human Resources and Legal departments had to review every application for potential conflicts of interest. For example, an MHH staff member working in a department that uses a particular company’s X-ray equipment cannot accept an offer for a lucrative lecture tour from that company. But while income from third-party engagements was rising, the number of employees in Human Resources management at MHH fell by seven full-time workers.
Michael Born, Director of the Human Resources and Legal departments at Hanover Medical School, recognized that MHH needed to increase efficiency. Employees had to enter data from forms that doctors had completed by hand. In addition, as a training hospital, MHH struggled with a transient staff of doctors who had little time to adapt to the medical center policies and practices.
“We’re happy that our doctors are leaving to pursue their careers,” says Born. “But if they’re only at MHH for a short stay, they don’t have time to become familiar with our administrative processes."
As a result, doctors often asked permission from the wrong employees or submitted incomplete documents for approval and verification. In the best cases, an application could be approved in a day, but if documents for an application needed to be tracked down, it could take up to four weeks. “A lot of time was lost on searching for applications and documents,” says Born. “We wanted to save this bandwidth and take care of each instance within a few days.”
MHH wanted to develop an environment where every process was included in a workflow system. “We wanted to tell users what information and attachments we needed, right from the beginning,” says Born. “We wanted one place where applications can go, and where all parties can go to check on the status of an application.”
In addition to simplifying and automating the approval process for outside engagements, the medical center wanted to simplify the administrative processes of hiring new employees and extending temporary contracts, and to improve collaboration between departments. MHH wanted a system that was flexible, simple to use, and easy and inexpensive to deploy and maintain.
Solution
The MHH IT Center and the Division of Patient Care Board began working with Microsoft and Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Trinovis GmbH to evaluate several solution options. Partly because it would integrate easily with the medical center’s SAP Enterprise Resource Planning software, the MHH IT Center recommended a solution based on Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007.
MHH had already had some good experiences with Office SharePoint Server 2007. Many MHH institutes already use the collaboration software to guide employees through the necessary documentation, feedback, and approval workflows needed for European ISO 9001 quality management certification. MHH also uses Office SharePoint Server 2007 as a document management system, storing all documentation needed for certification.
Trinovis GmbH, a consulting firm that specializes in healthcare management, configured and implemented the solution based on MHH requirements. “We tested the process that Trinovis GmbH developed in the Legal and Human Resources departments, and we were absolutely thrilled,” says Born.
Several MHH departments—approximately 50 employees—began testing the solution in August 2008. Over the course of the test, Human Resources and Legal successfully processed 160 applications for travel or secondary employment. By March 2009, MHH had begun testing the solution in other departments.
During the initial deployment, MHH had to learn and try to meet the requirements of different departments and even individual doctors. With tools like the Microsoft Office InfoPath® 2007 information gathering program, Trinovis GmbH and MHH were able to easily resolve any challenges.
“As long as people’s requirements were at the interface level, we found InfoPath was a great tool to satisfy our users with low effort but high impact,” says Joachim Bergmann, Project Manager at Trinovis GmbH.
After logging on to the MHH intranet, doctors can call up their personal Office SharePoint Server 2007 portal page, answer some preliminary questions, and open the correct form. When filling out forms, users receive help and are notified if an important document is missing.
With the Active Directory® directory service, MHH provides users access to the intranet, manages permissions for the network, and identifies and automatically notifies a user’s manager when an application has been submitted. Because of the seamless integration between Microsoft Office products, MHH can easily integrate documents from Microsoft Office Word and Microsoft Office Excel® spreadsheet software into the Office SharePoint Server environment, and users can communicate with contacts listed in the Office SharePoint Server 2007 portal using the Microsoft Office Outlook® messaging and collaboration client.
Benefits
With Office SharePoint Server 2007, MHH has simplified and accelerated its approval process for outside engagements, and developed an environment that will improve other administrative processes and enhance collaboration. Administration staffers no longer have to re-enter data into requests, and reviewers no longer need to search for related documents; they now receive complete applications using the correct and up-to-date forms. In the end, doctors and professors receive approval for their requests more quickly.
“Everything pointed to using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007,” says Born. “We did something in three months that we hadn’t been able to accomplish in two years.”
Streamlined Workflows
With Office SharePoint Server 2007, MHH has standardized the approval process for external engagements and made it more efficient. Applicants no longer have to start over if they make a mistake in the application, and Human Resources and Legal staff only receive applications that are complete and ready for evaluation. Now, the right forms are always used, documents are complete, and the right people are included in the process. Users can query the status of an application using a browser, which means that followup calls and e-mails are a thing of the past.
“The real advantage in terms of efficiency is that we now have a standardized process,” says Born. “In the past, a department would go to verify an application, and about three quarters of the way in, they would realize that something was wrong. If that happened, the application would have to be sent back, and the whole process would have to start from the beginning again. We don’t have that problem with Office SharePoint Server 2007.”
Easy Adoption
MHH employees also benefit from the system because products in the 2007 Microsoft Office system are well integrated. Applicants and reviewers at MHH can include Office Word and Office Excel files in their applications and communications, and use contact data from programs like Office Outlook, for example, to send messages to other workgroup members. And because the Office SharePoint Server 2007 interface is familiar, easy, and intuitive to use, MHH employees have adapted quickly to the new system with little training.
“The Office SharePoint portal interface is extremely user friendly, unlike most workflow systems, which are very complex—and which have very high training overhead and costs,” says Bergmann.
Flexibility
“Many workflow solutions fail in a hospital situation. Workflow programs are often dialogue centered and work on a set sequence of procedures—but in hospitals, procedures are constantly changing,” says Bergmann. “Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 lets hospitals develop workflow solutions quickly and cost-effectively.”
With Office SharePoint Server 2007, MHH has the flexibility it needs, and programming overhead is much lower than for other workflow systems. Doctors can easily create customized input screens based on their own requirements. Employees in the Human Resources and Legal departments can process applications in any order, without losing administrative oversight.
Enhanced Collaborative Environment
Born is sure that doctors, professors, and medical center staff will continue to readily adopt the new procedures, understanding how they will save valuable time instead of searching for and filling out forms.
“There are still many processes that need to be optimized and brought into an electronic workflow,” says Born. “If everything continues as smoothly as it has, we’ll deploy Office SharePoint Server 2007 for all of MHH to approve business trips, lecture engagements, and conflict-of-interest applications. We’ll do away with the paper-based system completely.”
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