microsoft teams healthcare case study

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Rapid implementation of Microsoft Teams in response to COVID-19: one acute healthcare organisation’s experience

1 Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College London, London, UK

2 Department of Clinical Informatics, Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust, London, UK

Timothy Yates

3 Department of Neurology, Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust, London, UK

Penelope Smith

4 Department of Acute Medicine, Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust, London, UK

Daisy Henderson

5 Department of Medical Education, Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust, London, UK

Glenn Winteringham

6 Information Management and Technology Directorate, Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust, London, UK

7 Department of Nephrology, Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust, London, UK

Associated Data

bmjhci-2020-100209supp001.pdf

Background COVID-19 presented significant challenges to healthcare organisations, which needed to rapidly remodel their services but were unable to allow staff to meet face to face to minimise infection risk. During this communication predicament, National Health Service (NHS) Digital announced the provision of Microsoft Teams, a digital communication and collaboration tool, which was implemented at Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust within 2 weeks.

Method Given the need to deploy at scale, rapidly and with minimal resource, an agile decentralised innovation management approach was used, empowering staff to be local implementors.

Results Resulting use cases were highly original and varied, ranging from a COVID-19 Education Programme to coordination of oxygen demand. Analytics showed rapid and persistent adoption, surpassing 500 daily active users within 11 days. Usage continues to increase, consistent with a direct network effect.

Conclusion These findings suggest a high demand for this format of communication and high willingness to adopt it. Further qualitative research into staff perceptions would be valuable to confirm this, and to assess the user experience.

Overall, this has been a radical approach to digital implementation in healthcare, and has so far proved effective in delivering a cost minimal, rapid communication tool at scale in the midst of a global pandemic.

Introduction

Royal Free Hospital admitted its first COVID-19 positive patient on 9 February 2020. The challenge of the pandemic then grew exponentially. At its peak the Royal Free London National Health Service (NHS) Foundation Trust was seeing 93 patients with a confirmed COVID-19 infection per day requiring up to 689 inpatient beds across two acute hospital sites; with an average staff absence rate of 1282 staff per day, equivalent to over 10% of the organisation’s workforce.

In response the organisation rapidly remodelled. Clinicians were reallocated to different specialities and roles, facilities repurposed to provide new in-patient and intensive care unit (ITU) capacity, administrative staff redeployed, routine elective activity postponed or cancelled and outpatient clinics moved to non-face-to-face modalities.

Typically during such a large organisational challenge, effective communication is paramount. However, this particular crisis had the added complication that staff were instructed to avoid meeting in person and, instead, to work from home wherever possible, to minimise contagion risk. As a result, traditional face-to-face communication methods were no longer available or to be relied on, and existing digital communication tools were not approved for professional use due to information governance concerns. For example, WhatsApp was not felt to be compliant with NHS England’s guidelines ‘on the use of instant messaging software in acute clinical settings’ 1 due to the inability to remotely delete messages or schedule automatic message deletion, and Zoom had come under significant public scrutiny of its data security at the time. 2

During these difficult circumstances, NHS Digital announced free provision of Microsoft Teams across the NHS to assist in the COVID-19 response. 3 Microsoft Teams is a digital communication and collaboration software tool, available in both mobile and computer application formats, protected and monitored within the NHS Secure Boundary. 3 Its headline features include group video calls for virtual meetings, instant messaging and presence, document collaboration and version control, and discussion forums (called ‘channels’) organised into groups called ‘teams’. In light of the pressure on healthcare organisations its use in transmitting patient identifiable clinical information was approved.

Coincidentally, prior to the pandemic the organisation had been conducting an options appraisal of digital clinical communication tools, and Microsoft Teams had emerged as a strong preference because of its feature-set and ease of use. Therefore, after its release, there was familiarity and support for this tool at executive level.

The objectives of implementing Microsoft Teams were, first, to support high quality, comprehensive non-face-to-face communication and allow for safe and effective reductions in non-essential face-to-face communication in order to minimise infection risk, to improve staff availability, and to develop or improve the ability and experience of remote interactions for our staff members.

The coronavirus pandemic was disruptive of almost all normal organisational functions, with non-clinical teams redeployed to focus on urgent requests, such as absence management, frequent and detailed site reports, new reporting on COVID-19 service critical parameters (such as oxygen usage), and operational support required in reconfiguring clinical areas including the creation of new intensive care beds.

As a result, within the organisation there was minimal resource available to spend on deployment of Microsoft Teams, despite the desire to get this tool into circulation as soon as possible. Therefore, a traditional implementation model with a project programme, specific objectives, steering and implementation groups was not possible. Instead, to minimise resource costs without slowing down the deployment, it was decided to use an agile, decentralised innovation management approach. 4 Any member of staff was able to request creation of a Team, and they were then empowered as a superuser and owner of that Team to deploy it among their colleagues, administer and be a point of contact for their colleagues who needed support.

There was minimal internal advertising of Microsoft Teams, instead relying on external advertising by NHS Digital, 3 enthusiasm from early technology adopters and word of mouth publicity. The only exception to this was that executive branches of the trust were directly approached to install Microsoft Teams as the organisation’s preferred method to host virtual meetings.

New Teams in Microsoft Teams were created and tracked by information management and technology staff, who maintained an overview of the deployment. They were also available to support superusers who were unable to solve technical issues locally and escalate issues to the provider when needed.

Finally, evaluation was conducted by analysing how Microsoft Teams was used, and by monitoring usage statistics within the trust over time, with metrics of daily active users, number of private messages sent, and number of virtual meetings. A survey of users was also considered, however given the emergency situation there was limited appetite among users to participate in non-essential activities.

Users’ adoption of Microsoft Teams was positive, with the following use cases emerging during the implementation:

• To deliver medical education sessions virtually, avoiding the need to meet in person.
• To host non-face-to-face multidisciplinary team (MDT) meetings (eg, lung cancer MDT meetings).
• To host documents that are frequently updated (eg, staff rota).
• To facilitate large group discussion forums (eg, COVID-19 Journal Club).
• To edit shared documents collaboratively (eg, research papers).
• To share data quickly using instant messages (eg, oxygen usage in different wards).
• To host virtual meetings (eg, board meetings).
• To broadcast live video streams (eg, chief executive briefings).

In addition, usage analytics showed very quick uptake of Microsoft Teams within the organisation. The tool was released on 19 March 2020, 3 and by 31 March 2020 had reached 667 daily active users ( table 1 ). An active user is defined as a unique user who performed an intentional activity in Microsoft Teams, such as starting a call, sending a chat message, or participating in a meeting, and does not include passive actions such as automatic log-in or minimising the application.

Usage analytics of Microsoft Teams by Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust

NHS, National Health Service.

Relative to other software deployed in the trust, this degree of uptake within 3 months of release was extremely impressive, and adoption continued to increase over time, exceeding 1000 daily active users on 5 May 2020 ( online supplemental data sheet 1 ).

Supplementary data

Moreover, these figures show that the rate of adoption has not slowed during these 3 months. This is consistent with a direct network effect: as more people become regular users of Microsoft Teams, it becomes more attractive to new users to communicate and collaborate with their colleagues, resulting in a self-sustaining increase in use similar to that seen in other Microsoft Teams deployments. 5

One of the most popular uses of Microsoft Teams is the Trust’s COVID-19 Education Programme. So far over 70 teaching sessions have been delivered using virtual meetings, ranging from large group lectures to small group interactive sessions and group reflective practice, which have been watched live over 4000 times. 6 This was a multidisciplinary programme taught by healthcare professionals from over 20 specialities. 6

In addition, these sessions were recorded and uploaded to Microsoft Stream for staff to watch in their own time, with over 500 views so far, also allowing for increased accessibility with features such as automatic subtitles and offline viewing.

Given the context of a pandemic, this method of an agile, decentralised implementation of Microsoft Teams allowed the trust to deploy this tool at scale to front-line staff, with minimal resource cost, in a rapid time frame ( table 2 ).

Context and timeline of Microsoft Teams Deployment at Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust

The high usage statistics described above suggests a high demand for this format of communication and high willingness to adopt it.

However, when assessing this deployment against its original aim of reducing non-essential face-to-face communication, this study is limited, as it is difficult to be sure that Microsoft Teams reduced face to face meetings due to the lack of a comparison group. Instead, it is possible that the face-to-face meetings continued regardless, and Microsoft Teams increased the overall volume of communication by enabling virtual meetings that would otherwise not have taken place.

Moreover, without a comparison group, it is difficult to be robustly confident that the success of this implementation was solely due to its decentralised model. Examples from South Australia show extremely impressive uptake and reduced face-to-face meetings with a centralised deployment, 5 suggesting that regardless of the implementation method, there was high cultural willingness of staff to adopt new ways of working in this emergency.

The high usage statistics and multiple use cases do suggest that the regularity and ability of communicating at a distance was improved. However, this evidence would be strengthened with qualitative data to be more confident that this reflects an improvement in staff communication and experience, instead of simply switching from a non-approved messaging service. Further qualitative data are needed to understand the psychological impacts of new and additional platforms, and to ascertain whether they improve or contribute to cognitive overload.

Finally, it should be noted that while this agile, decentralised approach was successful in this context, it does have its drawbacks. First, the lack of a centralised approval process for new team creation has resulted in a wide degree of inconsistency, with some staff requesting one team for an entire division, while others request multiple teams for each project. Second, by relying on local staff to champion and deploy Microsoft Teams in their area, this has resulted in inequity where some departments have a large degree of support, while others have none. Finally, from a governance perspective this approach is more difficult to monitor, and therefore, more difficult to identify problems or lessons learnt.

Conclusions

The overall lesson learnt from this implementation was to select the best deployment approach for the current context, and to be bold in making use of an approach that is rarely seen in health and social care. The circumstances of: an international pandemic; minimal resources; an urgent need to improve communication lines; and the sudden provision of a well-established communication tool, combined in this case to suggest that a centralised, conventional model of deployment was not appropriate.

While it could be argued that centralised deployments have proven equally effective elsewhere, 5 they generally cost more and if the organisational structure is not already in place they may take more time to initiate. 4

Another lesson learnt was having the confidence to minimise bureaucracy. Having proposed a decentralised and agile implementation of Microsoft Teams, trust executives were confident in assessing the situation and making a quick decision in order to assist the COVID-19 response. This rapid decision making allowed enthusiastic staff to rapidly deploy a new communication tool, redirecting those who had already independently begun to pursue their own solution. As a result, quick decision making in this case avoided a situation of a fragmented, insecure and unprotected collection of communication tools with no executive oversight.

Finally, a number of lessons were learnt from local superusers on how to encourage adoption among front-line staff. Crowdsourcing these ideas together allowed for a far greater degree of optimisation than would have been possible otherwise, with suggestions ranging from exclusively hosting important content (eg, rotas) on Microsoft Teams, to providing deep links to content within the Microsoft Teams application, and copying important regular emails (eg, trust bulletins) into Microsoft Teams. This is a commonly cited advantage of a decentralised innovation management approach. 4

Given the limitations above, further qualitative research into users’ perceptions of Microsoft Teams would be highly desirable, such as surveys of its impact on face to face meetings, the user experience and the impact on other internal communication tools. The organisation plans to continue promoting Microsoft Teams after easing of restrictions, to improve internal communication, collaborate at a distance and improve convenience for staff who work across multiple sites. It is expected that usage of features that replace face-to-face meetings, such as video calls, will plateau or decrease as staff resume meeting in person, but that usage of other features such as instant messages will continue to increase as new users adopt the software.

Overall, this had been a radical approach to digital implementation in healthcare and has so far proved effective in delivering a cost minimal, rapid communication tool at scale in the midst of a global pandemic.

Twitter: @jaymehta50

Contributors: JM, GW and AB conceived and planned the project. JM, TY and PS conducted the project, while AB and GW supervised. JM and DH implemented educational aspects of the project. JM and DH collected results, analysed them and wrote the draft manuscript. All authors reviewed, added to and edited the manuscript.

Funding: The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Competing interests: None declared.

Patient consent for publication: Not required.

Provenance and peer review: Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

Data availability statement: All data relevant to the study are included in the article or uploaded as online supplemental information.

Supplemental material This content has been supplied by the author(s). It has not been vetted by BMJ Publishing Group Limited (BMJ) and may not have been peer-reviewed. Any opinions or recommendations discussed are solely those of the author(s) and are not endorsed by BMJ. BMJ disclaims all liability and responsibility arising from any reliance placed on the content. Where the content includes any translated material, BMJ does not warrant the accuracy and reliability of the translations (including but not limited to local regulations, clinical guidelines, terminology, drug names and drug dosages), and is not responsible for any error and/or omissions arising from translation and adaptation or otherwise.

Microsoft Teams for Healthcare Services

As one of the most dynamic and demanding sectors, healthcare employs more than just technologies and tools. It also views interoperable data and open, secure platforms as the key to better collaboration and patient care. Microsoft Teams is one such solution — a single hub for blurring information barriers.

Digital transformation processes are accelerating across all industries and Microsoft is a clear leader in providing digital tools, elements of digital infrastructure, and cutting edge technologies. Healthcare is one of the most significant sectors in the Microsoft ecosystem covering the needs of businesses and organizations of all sizes from large hospitals to mid-size practices to small not-for-profit organizations. As an MS Gold Partner , we are taking advantage of tools like Teams in our telehealth solution, Azure in our modern architectures and software, PowerBI to construct and generate powerful reports. These tools and services do not only simplify existing workflows but also create a flexible operational canvas that can be edited and shared in real-time. In this post, we'd like to give you some insight on the benefits of embracing Microsoft Teams as a powerful communication and collaboration platform for an organization of any size.

Now that healthcare professionals can access a number of functionalities without needing to switch apps, we suggest taking a closer look into  how  these capabilities can be leveraged. 

Unique Advantages for Healthcare Professionals

Below are six benefits for companies to consider as they evaluate Teams as one of the primary communication and collaboration tools.

Virtual Health Experiences

Microsoft Teams’ meeting capabilities can be divided into several broad categories:

• Teleconsultations for continued care provision through a remote mechanism;
• Tele-expertise to confirm a diagnosis; 
• Teleassistance to guide nurses;
• Broadcasts for other specialists or a medical community during surgery;
• Internal meetings for medical councils and multi-disciplinary discussions.

Protected Health Information and Compliance

You don’t need to take any additional action to obtain or sign a HIPAA Business Associate Agreement (BAA). Teams enable businesses to enter into a HIPAA BAA by default. 

Also, Microsoft makes contractual assurances about operational compliance in accordance with the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act. This ensures transparent data safeguarding, data access, and reporting.

Secure Messaging

Teams enhances secure messaging capabilities through:

• Federated messaging (encrypted exchanges from outside of your organization)
• Status messaging (delegating and directing messages)
• Priority notifications (repeated delivery of urgent messages)
• Smart camera (virtual consultations with no privacy risks)

Data Collection

Microsoft Teams can be easily integrated into on-field data collection. While electronic health records software (EHR) is too heavy for mobile devices, the Teams platform provides an easy way to input data from smartphones and tablets.

Team Collaboration

The platform offers a predefined template of settings, channels, and pre-installed apps. This ensures that a ward, pod, department, or multiple areas within a medical center can start communicating and collaborating better with minimal effort. Meetings and conversations can happen across a range of devices, which also simplifies deployment. 

Administrative Workflows

Clinicians and staff can coordinate work, schedules, documents, tasks, and so on. Using Teams’ schedule management tool, Microsoft Shifts, members can also add notes, locations, and durations to update each other with as much detail as needed. 

Supporting Scalability and Flexibility in Telehealth

Microsoft Teams and other management systems have been the gateway for consumer brands entering telehealth and virtual care. At the same time, B2B brands have also shown the desire to update health systems at scale. 

At the beginning of the unprecedented public health crisis in 2020, healthcare specialists were using ad-hoc strategies. But what started with baby monitors for patient monitoring and Zoom for socially distant family meetings grew into strategic virtual services. 

It doesn't mean that Teams wasn’t used before. But now, instead of using tech as point solutions to specific problems, many are adapting workflows with system-wide software. And as everyone’s minds have been opened to the value of virtual care, we see an ongoing telehealth expansion.

One of the great examples of how Microsoft Teams provides a solution to many challenges for integrated healthcare is the  case  of NHS Arden and GEM Commissioning Support Unit. AGEM’s intention was to migrate from the legacy position to cloud-first services.

The main challenge before migration was duplication and wasted effort. With the help of Microsoft’s partner like Convergine, they set the goal to reduce the number of system silos and improve the team’s ability to support end-users with Microsoft Teams, Office 365, OneDrive, and SharePoint. The suite of tools is described as a “Swiss Army knife” with familiar experience flows that helped fast-track the adoption.

Chris Reynolds, Head of Innovation and Product Development at AGEM, pointed out that Microsoft Teams created a major change in their method of working. For instance, it offered a way to connect multi-disciplinary teams, customers, and the supply chain across dispersed geographies. Not to mention, they maximized the help of Teams’ technical specialists to achieve the best return.

Takeaway: Increasing Impact and ROI With Microsoft Teams

According to the Total Economic Impact  study  of Microsoft Teams, improved collaboration and information sharing helps save up to 4 hours per week for information workers. Teams also reduced the total number and duration of meetings and compliance and eDiscovery efforts. Across 350 users in the study, the savings on working with customers totaled $759,493 over three years.

These are just a few figures pulled from the study. But it’s enough to gauge the quantified benefits of MS Teams. While not in the study, it’s also important to highlight the qualitative changes that Teams can bring to clinics, medical practices, hospitals, and medical centers — for instance, user experience and connectivity.

If you’d like to calculate how Microsoft 365 solutions can improve your business metrics, you can use this  ROI calculator .

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CASE STUDY: The history of AllWays on Teams

The medical landscape has changed drastically since the start of the pandemic, most notably with the rise in telehealth and virtual care. Our own telehealth platform, AllWays on Teams, was created out of this need. In light of Microsoft’s recently-published case study on AllWays on Teams, here’s a look back at the beginnings of our telehealth platform.

The creation of AllWays on Teams

In the early days of COVID-19’s emergence in the US, we could see the challenges it was beginning to create for providers, particularly independent providers. Though their patients needed their care more than ever, they feared the risk of transmission in their crowded waiting rooms. A few days before Governor Charlie Baker issued a stay-at-home advisory back in March, AllWays Health Partners developed AllWays on Teams, a customized telehealth platform based on Microsoft Teams.

By the time the advisory went into effect, AllWays on Teams had launched for contracted providers. Now, our providers had a way to continue providing care for their patients without putting their patients or themselves at risk for contracting COVID-19. While AllWays on Teams was originally intended to be a temporary tool for providers, the response to it was so overwhelmingly positive that we decided to make AllWays on Teams a permanent addition to our digital tools less than two weeks after launch. By mid-May, more than 475 health providers had conducted more than 5,000 telehealth sessions over AllWays on Teams.

To learn more about how AllWays on Teams was developed, check out Microsoft’s case study on AllWays on Teams .

Learn more about AllWays on Teams

To find more information on AllWays on Teams, visit our website . There, you can find an overview on AllWays on Teams and how to sign up, as well as an introductory webinar, set-up demo, FAQ, and more. You can also check out our blog posts about AllWays on Team’s launch and our decision to make it permanent for our providers.

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The future of productivity

• Call for Change
• When Tech Meets Human Ingenuity
• A Valuable Difference
• Meet the Team
• Related Capabilities

Call for change

Accenture has already deployed Microsoft Teams as our leading communications and collaboration platform. Now, our vision is to establish Teams as the digital hub for all collaboration and productivity tools and applications.

Accenture employees spend more than half of their daily working hours in Teams. Our 569,000 users share around 589 million chat messages a month, 1.2 billion audio minutes per month and 141 million video minutes a month on the platform.

But with a tool as versatile as Teams, we are always looking for ways to extend its capabilities, so that we can bring common business tools and services together to the place where people are collaborating. We want to maximize Teams to harness the power of the platform and evolve new ways of working. And we want to realize real productivity improvements and value.

Teams is far more than a means to exchange information and ideas. Its platform extensions are evolving our people’s experience with natural connections to where work is generated.

By integrating how people collaborate with where they work, we can reduce response-based activities and navigate across dimensions to unleash powerful new levels of productivity.

“Microsoft Teams helps our people to get work done faster—ultimately, it’s a platform for teamwork and a springboard to business value.” — Jason Warnke , Senior Managing Director – Global IT, Global Digital Experiences Lead

When tech meets human ingenuity

Working without barriers is part of our organization’s DNA. Our global IT team wants to bring the right tools to where our people work, rather than expecting them to search out multiple, disparate tools to be effective and productive. And we recognize that having a powerful change and adoption strategy is a vital ingredient in making that happen.

As early as 2017, we decided to migrate to Teams , a chat-centered business collaboration platform that brings together people, content and tools to get things done.

But there is far more to Teams than simply a communications and messaging capability. When used as a platform, Teams has a variety of options that can help to build business applications and tailor the platform to meet people’s individual needs. Examples include:

Personal apps

Embedded Web experience within Teams, personalized to an individual user.

Apps added as a tab within a targeted Team, channel, or group chat providing embedded experiences for all members.

Chatbots providing text-based interactions to either individuals or within a Team or channel.

Messaging extensions

Shortcuts to insert content or take actions on Instant Message (IM) messages without leaving Teams chat.

Meeting extensions

Apps tied to individual Teams meetings.

Using such capabilities helps us to move from disconnected work experiences to integrated app experiences. So, for instance, today in Teams people can get technology support, connect to common business applications, manage approvals and even access apps focused on mental wellness, such as the Thrive Reset app.

More than 60 apps are available and Teams supports 100,000 support chats and 150,000 support enquiries. In particular, an enterprise bot known as Ask @Accenture is embedded in Teams offering services and advice on areas as diverse as career information, time report submission, mobile device setup, country holiday information and much more. There’s been a 25% increase in usage in this bot when made available in Teams compared to usage on our company portal. With this solution, our employees can get their questions answered up to 70% faster.

Platform roadmap

As we go forward, we continue to employ change management to progress how Teams is being used. To help our people get the most value from Teams, we guide them to work in a new way and this ongoing approach to adoption is fundamental to our success.

We are planning to introduce more third-party apps and services that bring common tools and services directly to the Teams interface. Building on our strong, established relationships with ServiceNow , Salesforce and Workday , we expect to introduce apps and functions that extend the use of those enterprise platforms.

Also, the pipeline will introduce Power Apps—some built by citizen developers —and other custom productivity enablers, such as a unified, cross-enterprise approvals experience. And we continue to partner with Microsoft as it brings new innovative collaboration offerings, like the employee experience platform, Microsoft Viva. We have already taken advantage of Viva Insights to help our employees gain insights to balance their productivity and wellbeing. With Viva Topics, Viva Connections and Viva Learning, we plan to surface knowledge, expertise, company news and training tailored to the needs of our people within the flow of their day to day work.

A valuable difference

By integrating where people collaborate with where they work, we are able to not only help people get work done faster, but also unleash a new wave of productivity.

We have seen a 20% reduction in the time spent on response-based activities (such as surveys, e-mails and employee actions) and people are spending 35% less time navigating across multiple destinations.

Here are some of the key elements of our journey to enhanced productivity:

• Use case prioritization: We’ve focused on strategic platforms, such as ServiceNow, Salesforce and Workday and prioritized unified experiences.
• IT operating model: We’ve used a DevSecOps model to enable strategic transformation and identified an implementation partner to scale up faster.
• Change and adoption: We’ve focused investment on transformation change efforts.
• Governance and environmental management: We’re enabling compliance at scale by creating a standard baseline. We’ve defined governance for app deployment.
• Talent development: We’ve enhanced talent by cross-skilling platform architects and developers and use Microsoft certifications to skill up quickly.

Today, the Teams platform is familiar and flexible enough to be used an engagement medium, just like mobiles or the Web. And our people have access to the data, insights and apps they need to work on their best day, every day.

Meet the team

Jason Warnke

Karen Odegaard

Grant Gengelbach

Ryan Harvill

Related capabilities, how accenture does it, accenture runs on microsoft.

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HUS: sharing data securely to make life-saving decisions

Sarah Devitt

Microsoft, Digital Transformation and Public Sector

Illnesses and diseases don’t often play fair – an unfortunate truth that was proved by the COVID-19 outbreak in early 2020, heavily hitting healthcare organizations with challenges the world hadn’t seen in a century.

Hospitals needed a rapid response to reduce spreading the virus without affecting patient care. A high-pressure situation for any institution, but for the hospital district of Helsinki and Uusimaa (HUS), it was a time to embrace digitization – forever changing how consultants and patients interact across the group’s 23 hospitals.

“We were already trialing new collaboration tools in certain departments, but COVID-19 really sped up the roll-out across the hospitals,” recalls Miikka Korja, Associate Professor of Neurosurgery and Chief Innovation Officer at HUS.

“There was some hesitation to start using new technology, especially from the older neurosurgeons. But suddenly none of us had a choice, and now we’re all better off for it.”

Working with Microsoft, the organization had been a frontrunner in healthcare digitalization for many years, and already implemented a cloud-based system in 2017. Now, as social distancing measures began changing how doctors and patients could interact, HUS needed to introduce new technology once again – this time on a much larger scale.

The shift to digital healthcare

HUS is Finland’s largest healthcare provider and one of Europe’s leading healthcare organizations, bringing together 23 different hospitals and treating more than 680,000 patients a year. Among their many specialties, the HUS neurosurgery clinic is ranked among the very best in the world, performing close to 4,000 operations a year – 1,000 of which are emergency cases.

“We are the only neurosurgical clinic for over a third of the Finnish population, about 2.2 million people,” says Anselmi Kovalainen, Resident of Neurosurgery at HUS.

“Many of our patients are time-critical and have life-threatening illnesses, so it’s essential the neurosurgeons always have the latest imaging scans in front of them to decide if surgery is the right call.”

With Microsoft cloud services and Microsoft 365 tools already in place across HUS, a Microsoft Teams trial was introduced in 2020 to help improve communication and allow medical staff to more easily share sensitive information like imaging scans between clinicians securely.

However, as COVID-19 social distancing measures changed how patients and doctors could interact, the group quickly scaled-up Microsoft Teams from 5,000 users to all 29,000 employees of HUS.

“We were already using Teams in neurosurgery and had been discussing how we could utilize it for patient visits as well,” says Korja. “Then COVID-19 hit – and that decision was made for us.

“None of us could be in the same room anymore, so having a safe way to communicate with each other and our patients was essential. But by using these tools we’ve changed a lot of our meeting standards, and everyone’s been super happy about the new way of working.”

Sharing life-saving information

With Microsoft Teams now being used across the HUS group, staff have a secure platform to collaborate both inside the hospital and remotely for any self-isolating colleagues. An essential tool for the HUS neurosurgery clinic, where sharing confidential patient information is vital to ensure decisions can be made quickly and efficiently.

“Since COVID-19, our daily radiology meetings are now in a hybrid format, where the physical meeting still takes place but people can join remotely through Teams,” explains Kovalainen. “It’s important everyone attends as we go through the imaging for any upcoming cases – and for major surgeries, everything relies on these scans.

“Most doctors actually prefer attending these meetings through Teams,” he adds. “It’s easy to set up on personal devices which is more convenient for them, and also offers secure access to this confidential information at all times – without losing image quality.”

Remote access to these images has been incredibly important for emergency cases, where a consultant like Miikka needs to make a life-saving decision out of hours – a scenario that would normally take time that a patient may not have.

“I might call Miikka in the middle of the night and if he wanted to view the scans he would have to log into multiple programs that could take 5-10 minutes,” says Kovalainen. “But now I can just call him in Teams and instantly share my screen, so he can make an accurate decision there and then.”

“In these major surgeries, you always want to check the scans yourself from every angle,” Korja adds. “Before I would have to ask Anselmi to rotate an image or zoom into a different one. But now with Teams, I can just request control and get a better look using my own mouse – as if I had the program open on my own computer.

“95% of the hospitals in the world don’t have a secure way to share images like this,” he says. “But that’s why I think Teams is a really good solution. You can easily share your screen and importantly share control of imaging software like we use, without needing any other infrastructure in place.”

Finding opportunities in remote-working tools

Since moving to virtual consultations, more than 30% of HUS patients have been treated remotely through Microsoft Teams, helping to keep both patients and doctors safe as well as save on unnecessary use of personal protective equipment.

Now HUS is working on a solution to bring this innovation inside the hospital walls too – by using Microsoft Teams as a safer way to check-in on COVID-19 patients.

“We’d been discussing for some time about giving patients a tablet for their room,” says Korja. “COVID-19 was an opportunity to trial this type of solution and let doctors communicate with patients through Teams, so they wouldn’t need to enter the room and risk infection.

“It’s a simple way to save on gloves and masks for doctors and saves time between visits,” he adds. “We’d like to have a tablet in each room in the future – not just for social distancing, but as a way to be more transparent with patients and give them access to their own data and test results.”

Another innovation has been to use Microsoft Teams for hospital schedules, replacing Microsoft Excel spreadsheets as a faster and more efficient way to manage staff shifts.

“Hospitals are using Excel for this all over the world,” says Korja. “Normally one person would update the sheet once or twice a week for a department of 25 people, which would take time they likely didn’t have.

“Now doctors can easily check the shift schedule from their phone, and soon we hope to have the whole process automated through Teams. Operation times, who’s on call, patient names, everything in one place that we can all access securely from anywhere.”

Expanding the digital offering

While every hospital has faced the same challenges over the few past months, HUS’s investment in technology has helped them quickly adapt in a way many could not. And now looking ahead, Miikka doesn’t think they plan to stop there.

“Our strategy going forward is to have the whole hospital using mobile tools within the next couple of years.

“It’s a challenge financially as a public hospital. But after COVID-19, more people are starting to understand how these solutions fit into the treatment path, which will help us implement more innovations in the future.”

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Contoso case study: Teams voice migration overview

• 6 contributors
• Applies to: Microsoft Teams

This article introduces a case study for how a fictional multi-national corporation, Contoso, implemented a Teams voice solution for their organization.

Contoso has deployed Microsoft 365 Enterprise and addressed major design decisions and implementation details for the following: networking, identity, Windows 10 Enterprise, Office 365 ProPlus, mobile device management, information protection, security, upgrade from Skype for Business to Teams, Phone System, and Audio Conferencing.

This article focuses on how Contoso migrated their on-premises users to Teams for unified communication, collaboration, and voice. For background information about how Contoso accelerated their digital transformation by using Microsoft's cloud services, see all the core articles starting with the Contoso case study overview .

https://learn.microsoft.com/microsoft-365/enterprise/contoso-case-study

In the core articles, you'll find information on the following:

• Contoso's IT infrastructure needs
• Windows 10 Enterprise
• Office 365 Pro Plus
• Mobile device management
• Information protection
• Summary of Microsoft 365 Enterprise security
• Team for a top-secret project
• SharePoint Online site for highly confidential digital assets

For information about planning an upgrade, you'll want to start with Getting started with your Microsoft Teams upgrade .

Contoso business goals for Teams

To migrate their on-premises users to Teams for unified communication, collaboration, and voice, Contoso decided on the following business goals:

Teams enablement

Contoso's unified communication and collaboration team enabled Teams with the correct policies to govern and enable secure internal and external collaboration.

Skype for Business to Teams upgrade

Skype for Business was widely deployed within Contoso. With the need to move off legacy systems, Contoso decided to upgrade their Skype for Business users to Teams. For more information, see Contoso case study: Teams upgrade plan .

Phone System

Skype for Business with enterprise voice was widely deployed within Contoso. With the need to move off legacy systems that were the next hop for their mediation servers, Contoso migrated their Skype for Business enterprise voice users to Phone System. Contoso sites used Microsoft Calling Plan, Phone System Direct Routing, or a combination of both. For more information, see Contoso case study: Phone System .

Location-Based Routing

With office locations in telephony-regulated countries/regions, Contoso needed to recreate the Location-Based Routing that was present in Skype for Business in their Phone System deployment. For more information, see Contoso case study: Location-Based Routing .

Emergency Calling

Where Direct Routing was implemented, Contoso set up emergency calling with approved third parties. For more information, see Contoso case study: Emergency Calling .

Audio Conferencing

Contoso set up Audio Conferencing service numbers that were hosted on their SIP trunk to their PSTN provider. For more information, see Contoso case study: Audio Conferencing .

Local Media Optimization

Contoso took advantage of Local Media Optimization in locations where they had one direct route trunk to Microsoft Phone System that was leveraged by remote sites. For more information, see Plan for Local Media Optimization and Configure Local Media Optimization .

Auto Attendants and Call Queues

Contoso wanted to provide receptionist support while their staff was working remotely. Contoso used auto attendants and call queues to manage incoming calls to their receptionist's phone number. For more information, see Contoso case study: Auto Attendants and Call Queues .

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Kacific, Microsoft APAC internet initiative

April 8, 2024

Kacific Broadband Satellites Group and Microsoft are collaborating to bring high-speed satellite internet access to 750 rural educational and healthcare institutions with a geographical coverage of 10 million across the Asia Pacific over the next two years using high-powered Ka-band beams from the Kacific1 satellite.

The initiative will connect schools and healthcare centres across Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Cook Islands, Samoa, and Timor-Leste, which will, in turn, connect the communities around them.

The project is part of Microsoft’s Airband initiative, which brings together internet and energy providers, government agencies, non-profits and the private sector to focus on closing the digital divide.

Case Study: Transformative Impact of the Partnership at Palawan Baptist Hospital

Palawan Baptist Hospital in the Philippines, which uses PhilHealth’s electronic claims system for claims management, serves as a great example of how this partnership between Kacific and Microsoft has bridged the digital divide and ultimately transformed lives. The infirmary previously used signal boosters, pocket Wi-Fi or prepaid Wi-Fi, but continued to experience unreliable and unaffordable connectivity. This posed a greater issue as all claims are processed online. Now, high-speed satellite internet access at the hospital has not only increased its efficiency and communication between hospitals, but also halved the costs for patients, as they no longer need to travel for hours to contact friends and family.

“Better internet access and streamlined communication for hospital transfers go hand in hand,” said Darren Jay Gacot, Head of Marketing, Communications & IT at Palawan Baptist Hospital.

Kacific’s Corporate Development Director, Beatrice Mok, commented: “These new sites will contribute significantly to expanding highspeed affordable internet usage in isolated communities. Kacific has the expertise and ecosystem, having installed community networks in the Pacific Islands with Guarantco, and we are confident about working with Microsoft’s Airband initiative in the countries we serve.”

Kacific’s approach to bringing high-speed accessible internet connectivity to developing countries prioritises connecting education institutions and public health facilities, aligning with their commitment to ESG goals.

“We look at the size of the community, its requirements for connectivity and what it can afford to ensure each site benefits as many people as possible in a sustainable manner,” continued Mok. “The sites for the project have been selected to ensure minimal overlapping coverage between the Wi-Fi hotspots (across both schools and clinics) and maximum population coverage in areas where the need is identified.”

“We believe access to the internet is a fundamental right, enabling economic opportunity for people, businesses, and governments. Our new collaboration with Kacific utilises satellite technology to connect communities within the Asia Pacific region that previously had limited or no access to conventional connectivity,” added Vickie Robinson, General Manager of Microsoft’s Airband Initiative. “Strategic alliances, like with Kacific, play a pivotal role in advancing access to connectivity and digital equity, particularly in some of the world’s most critical markets.”

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CallTower consolidates communication for Sight & Sound Theatres

If operations are the engine that keeps businesses moving, communication is the oil that keeps employees and processes in sync. That’s where unified communication platforms come in: to connect organizations with everything from voicemail and video calls to instant messaging and content sharing. And when these systems are bolstered by powerful integrations, they can completely transform how businesses work.

For more than 20 years, CallTower —a Microsoft Solutions Partner for Modern Work—has been transforming the way businesses communicate and collaborate, providing a comprehensive platform that fully integrates with Microsoft Teams.

"When you're talking about a business-class phone system, or a unified communication as a service (UCaaS) or call center as a service (CCaaS) setup, there's a lot more complexity than just getting a phone number,” said Sam Barron, Director of Global Sales at CallTower. “Because we have 12-plus years of experience in the Microsoft space and 20-plus years in the telecom space, we can differentiate between the competitive products out there to provide a better solution.”

A costly, complicated phone system

Sight & Sound Theatres , a live production company with locations in Pennsylvania and Missouri, brings stories from the Bible to life on a 300-foot stage with intricately designed sets, a cast of 65 actors, and even live animals. Every performance relies on seamless and reliable communication to coordinate between the corporate team, stage crew, actors, and customers.

Though innovation is at the heart of their productions, the company had an aging on-premises phone system that was costly to maintain and difficult to manage. “We found that the upkeep and maintenance work [on our old, on-premises system] was significant,” said Rob Taylor, Director of Information Technology at Sight & Sound. “Any adjustments were relegated to the one member of our team who really knew the system and could make changes.”

To keep up with the pace of their productions and serve their business in a more meaningful way, Sight & Sound knew it was time to modernize their communication infrastructure and consolidate with a Voice over Internet Protocol solution. "They didn't want to manage a physical piece of equipment anymore; they wanted to lift and shift everything into the cloud," said Jack Larson, Account Executive at CallTower.

With the addition of Microsoft Copilot , CallTower’s AI-powered discovery process covered every aspect that needed to be incorporated into the new phone system—including analog devices, elevator phone lines, and overhead paging.

"We have to make sure we're doing our best work during the discovery process to understand the exact solution that customers need," said Barron. “Because we're only as good as the notes that we take on these calls, we can leverage the notes and action items that Copilot generates for us when we move a customer to an order process or implementation.”

“We realized pretty quickly that we wanted to go with [CallTower] and to use Operator Connect as the methodology. The partnership was just great from start to finish”

A full-fledged solution with seamless implementation.

Because the Sight & Sound team was already using Teams for internal communication, CallTower offered a robust and native direct routing solution: Operator Connect for Microsoft Teams . The tool consolidates the management of various phones and extensions into one administrative portal so IT teams don’t have to manage multiple infrastructures, and Taylor was excited to move to “a user-friendly, intuitive console.”

But CallTower doesn’t just provide a portal and basic dial tone. They work with other software providers on contact center solutions, like advanced call reporting analytics and AI capabilities, to build a holistic solution that integrates with Teams. Barron said, “So [customers] can have their back-office standard phone system users working hand in hand with the contact center users.”

Just as CallTower’s services and solutions are more extensive than simply porting over phone numbers, the transition from a legacy phone system to a cloud-based system is much more involved. From the first discovery call to shipping the equipment, training, and moving phone numbers to the new system, CallTower’s team supported Sight & Sound at every step for a smooth transition to the cloud.

Internally, Sight & Sound often refers to the implementation process as the “gold standard” of vendor experience. “We realized pretty quickly that we wanted to go with [CallTower] and to use Operator Connect as the methodology,” said Taylor. “The partnership was just great from start to finish.”

“They can collaborate and communicate with their colleagues or customers from wherever they are”

Streamlined connections, all in one place.

Moving to a cloud-based communication system streamlined Sight & Sound’s daily workflows and processes and significantly reduced the resources required to manage the theater's communication infrastructure. When the solution was implemented, the theaters had around 500 employees using the old system. “We were able to reduce desk phone hardware by over 100 units,” said Taylor, who felt it was a seamless migration. “The next day we got a total of 11 help desk calls and most of those were a password reset.”

CallTower feels the biggest impact was the customer not having to manage multiple applications anymore. “You don’t have to click around and figure out where you're putting information and files, or how to communicate with a person internally anymore. It's all done through Teams,” Barron said.

The transition also made it easier for the team to ensure smooth operations and guest experiences on performance days. “[Sight & Sound employees] now have Teams on their cell phones, on their computers, maybe they have a physical phone on their desk,” said Larson. “So they can collaborate and communicate with their colleagues or customers from wherever they are—whether they’re at their desk or running backstage to figure out what they need for the next scene.”

This comprehensive approach not only addressed Sight & Sound’s immediate needs but also laid the groundwork for future scalability and innovation for customer engagement. The theater company has begun exploring additional services offered by CallTower, like SMS capabilities, to further enrich its communication ecosystem. Taylor said, “We’re keeping up with the CallTower updates and we’re excited to see that they’re continuing to press in with Microsoft to enhance an already great solution.”

Explore more Partner Success stories

School of Planning and Public Affairs

Sppa students win grand prize in ui 2024 global health case competition.

We are proud to announce that our students have received first place and the grand prize in the 2024 Global Health Case Competition for their project, “Improving Sustainability Outcomes in Homa Bay, Kenya.” In addition to receiving the first place monetary awards, they were selected by Dave Okech Okech , CEO of a Kenyan nonprofit, AquaRech Ltd, to implement a portion or all of their plan in that country! The competition is offered through the UI Institute of Public Health Research and Policy.

Their team included three School of Planning and Public Affairs (SPPA) masters students, Farnaz Fatahi Moghadam, Jovana Kolasinac, and Sanzida Rahman Setu, plus UI students Joe Maxwell (undergraduate in political science with an urban planning minor) and Sanya Sami (graduate student in public health). They competed against eight other teams representing a total of nine colleges to capture the win.

The aim of the contest is to train “the next generation of leaders through a unique competition experience built upon a real‐world challenge.” This year’s global health case study was “Sustainable Communities and Nutrition Concerns in Homa Bay, Kenya.” There were numerous aspects the students had to consider, including declining supply of fish as a primary protein source, supply chain issues, cultural implications, food insecurity, health concerns, and climate change. Additionally, they had to take into account complicating factors that were present, such as gender-based issues, economic and environmental impacts, and strategic alliance for policy implications to ensure the sustainability of their proposal. The team spent two months working on their project, incorporating many aspects of urban planning from their graduate classes.

The students’ winning proposal is available for viewing .  

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Microsoft takes privacy seriously. We remove all personal and organization-identifying information, such as company name, from the data before analyzing it and creating reports. We never use customer content—such as information within an email, chat, document, or meeting—to produce reports. Our goal is to discover and share broad workplace trends that are anonymized by aggregating the data broadly from those trillions of signals that make up the Microsoft Graph.