Ernest Health transforms collaboration with Microsoft Office 365

Office 365 is helping the hospital network seamlessly communicate via email, IM and video conferencing

Headquartered in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Ernest Health provides specialized medical and rehabilitative services to patients across the United States. We recently sat down with Vinnie Cardona, Director of IT, and Stacy Nash, Systems Administrator, to talk about their recent implementation of Microsoft Office 365 and the benefits they’re seeing across the company.

Tell us about your organization.

Cardona: We’ve been a healthcare provider in the post-acute-care space since 2004. We have 25 hospitals in four time zones across the United States. We employ 4,000 nurses, therapists, case managers, case coordinators, and physicians who work with patients recovering from disabilities caused by injuries or illnesses, or from chronic or complex medical conditions.

How are you planning to leverage Office 365?

Cardona: We’re looking to Office 365 and its various features to assist us in the communications and collaboration space. As we look at opening new hospitals, for example, OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online can help us collaborate by providing a secure place to store, share, and access information. And we’re starting to use Skype for Business as a video-conferencing tool to train our nurses and therapists.

How did your organization operate before Office 365, and what kinds of functionality demands were you seeing from users?

Nash: Our facilities operated in silos when it came to communication. Whatever little communication took place between facilities happened through formal meetings and conference calls. Office 365, and in particular SharePoint Online and Yammer, have enabled our nurses, therapists, and trainers to bring about a greater communication flow between all our facilities. It’s amazing to watch the improved communication that Office 365 is generating. Communication throughout the company is growing, and it’s a beautiful thing.

What are some of the ways in which employees are using Office 365?

Cardona: We started with Exchange Online, and as we introduce more parts of Office 365, we are finding our employees are clamoring for them. A couple of weeks ago, for example, the HR folks were in panic mode because they had to put on a webinar in just three days and had no idea how to use Cisco WebEx. We convinced them to use Skype for Business instead because it is so intuitive, and their webinar went off without a hitch. They see the power behind Skype, and now they’re asking when we will roll it out to everybody.

What led you to consider Office 365?

Cardona: We wanted to move Exchange email off the hosted provider we were using, so that sparked the conversation. With the hosted provider, we were experiencing extended periods of downtime. The service was subpar, as was the migration to the cloud with that vendor. Microsoft is the creator of Exchange, so we figured that Microsoft would be the best at hosting their own product. We wanted to go directly to the “source”  with the confidence that Microsoft would be able to host it flawlessly, and we had a high level of trust that Microsoft would treat us like a partner.

How did you go about evaluating Office 365?

Nash: The initial conversation centered on the licensing model and the financial incentives associated with that. We then outlined our requirements, which included encryption, mobile device management, legal holds, identity management, and the ability to do more with less. Office 365 best matched our needs without requiring us to piece together different products from different vendors. And in the long run, it will be cheaper than the other solutions we considered.

What was your experience with Office 365 onboarding and Microsoft Consulting Services?

Nash: The onboarding benefit allowed us to work remotely with Microsoft specialists to get our environment ready for Office 365. And Microsoft Consulting Services helped us to understand the process. They came out and broke down every step so that we had a high level of confidence that things were being handled to ensure a successful migration.

How did the deployment go?

Cardona: We were facing a time crunch because we had to migrate our entire datacenter from Virginia to Albuquerque, and we wanted to do the Exchange migration first. Even with the datacenter being down, employees could still use their email, which they were ecstatic about. We completed the entire Exchange migration in a month, migrating about 1,000 users at a time over a weekend, and then doing daily cutovers facility by facility. We used Skype for Business to create a “command center” during the migration process, which assured people that the lines of communication were always open. People could jump on the Skype for Business bridge at any time to ask questions, resolve issues, and communicate with the project managers, increasing their confidence that the migration would go well. In the end, we had no major issues at all. The migration was completely smooth.

What are your next steps?

Cardona: Our next step is to roll out Skype for Business across the organization. We’re also looking to deploy SharePoint Online, which is central to many of our initiatives. Whenever people use a part of Office 365, they say, “When can we use this across the board?” Folks can quickly identify how convenient it is to communicate and collaborate via Office 365, and they can see how it can improve their processes. With Office 365, we have all the different pieces that people want. And it’s seamlessly integrated into one solution, giving employees 24/7 access to the tools they need.

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Microsoft Industry for Healthcare Team

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