About Middlesex Hospital Alliance
Middlesex Hospital Alliance is a healthcare centre dedicated to providing primary and secondary healthcare services for over 60,000 residents in Southwestern Ontario. Middlesex Hospital Alliance (MHA) is comprised of two hospitals, Strathroy Middlesex General Hospital (SMGH), located in the city of Strathroy, and Four Counties Health Services (FCHS), located in the town of Newbury. In addition to providing primary and secondary healthcare services, the Middlesex Hospital Alliance provides emergency care, rehabilitation, diagnostic and ambulatory services.
Challenges
In March 2007, Middlesex Hospital Alliance began to search for a solution that would allow hospital management, doctors, nurses and support staff to seamlessly collaborate over the geographic distance between its two locations. The new intranet had to ensure that sensitive hospital documents and information remained secure while remaining accessible to end users according to their need and role within MHA. Critical documents, files and expertise had to be easy to find through intranet searches that could provide relevant, accurate and timely search results. After initially attempting an inhouse implementation of their intranet, Middlesex Hospital Alliance turned to SharePointHQ to implement Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) as their hospital intranet.
Solution
Based on the SharePointHQ audit team’s findings, and input from MHA stakeholders on their business and technical needs, SharePointHQ delivered a branded, custom hospital intranet, for use by the staff of both hospitals. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, SharePoint Designer 2007 were the main technologies used in the customization and deployment of the MHA intranet site. The hospital portal was built upon SharePoint 2007’s Collaboration, Portal, Enterprise Content Management and Enterprise Search core feature groups.
Coming Together Through SharePoint
A centralized, branded hospital intranet site, with a unified “look and feel” and single sign-on functionality, configured to optimize SharePoint 2007’s Collaboration and Portal feature groups, was implemented by SharePointHQ’s consultants. The new site promoted collaboration between the two hospitals by breaking down MHA’s geographical, departmental, and information silo barriers, through SharePoint’s social networking capabilities including wikis, document workspaces, forums, personal messaging, and RSS feeds. Communication and collaboration between the two campuses was further enhanced by interactive, audience targeted announcements and SharePoint’s real-time communication functionality. To ensure rapid end user adoption, an easy-to-use global navigation bar, with multi-level fly outs for all sub-sites, based upon user input, where information was always one click away was delivered.
The new portal was designed to maintain and build upon MHA’s joint healthcare culture through community sub-sites. Central to this was the Culture and News sub-site that acted as an online community centre where end users could keep up-to-date on the latest hospital news, check out each hospital’s cafeteria menu, read the CEO’s blog and access the Buy, Tell and Sell community exchange site. Other sub-sites included an online help desk, job posting board, joint meeting sub-sites, including a Health and Safety meeting site, and a hospital training portal where users could access online internal hospital and government mandated video training.
Secure Hospital Document Management
MHA’s files and documents where spread over three file shares between the two hospitals. This led to lost documents, lost time and multiple versions of the truth within MHA. To prevent this in the future, SharePointHQ’s experts created a central documents subsite where each department would drive its own content and allow users to access needed information, ensuring one version of the truth for each document. All hospital documents contained in the site were enabled with check-in/check-out, versioning control, content authoring, and content approval functionality. Given the sensitive and confidential nature of MHA’s files, access to documents was granted according to each end users role within the hospital using permission levels. On top of permission levels, an optional additional level of document security is available to MHA through Information Rights Management (IRM) in SharePoint. IRM prevents the unauthorized use of documents in a SharePoint site including the copying, printing and emailing of files.
Relevant, Secure and User Friendly Intranet Searches
Whether it is inpatient records, outpatient records, lab results, x-rays or other medical records, hospitals create a tremendous amount of information on a day-to-day basis. As this information experiences exponential growth the ability to quickly find needed documents and expertise is diminished. Using the Office SharePoint Server Search feature, hospital end users are able to make quick and relevant searches of all hospital files and records and locate hospital subject matter experts. Confidentiality of hospital records is maintained as search results are shown according to each end users assigned permission level. End users are able to search hospital records, including document contents, through a complete site search, by text, keyword and through multiple scopes.
Based on SharePointHQ’s assessment of MHA’s search requirements, three search options, advanced search, document search, and people search, were delivered. The Advanced Search centre was configured to allow for search by word, exact phrases, negative keywords, multiple languages and a multitude of properties including hospital, location, department, author, content type, document description and policy procedure. End users were able to find subject matter experts within the hospital and their degrees of separation through the People Search sub-site. The Documents sub-site displayed the top 10 most requested hospital documents above document search fields modified from the advanced search page. End users were presented with a choice of four custom views of the documents including by policy, procedure, forms and templates.
Benefits
After using the new hospital portal, end users reported immediate improvements in their ability to find files, confusion over document versions was eliminated, and there was improved collaboration between the two hospitals and their departments, teams and employees. End users also reported that the overall sense of community between the two hospital campuses has been strengthened.
By choosing SharePointHQ to delivery their healthcare centre intranet, Middlesex Health Alliance now has a secure, scalable, and extensible SharePoint portal that will allow its medical staff to better communicate, collaborate and continue to deliver quality healthcare to its patients.