Specialty Healthcare Provider

Achieves Workforce Transformation with Office 365 in the Cloud

An independent specialty healthcare provider faced threats from both traditional competitors as well as large healthcare organizations entering their market with specialty practices.  While they recognized the opportunity for expansion as demographics increased the size of the available market, innovating around customer service delivery for the modern workforce presented new challenges.

By teaming up with BDO Digital, The CIO was able to leverage the collective expertise needed to advance their business by transitioning to Office 365. This allowed his team to continue to focus on their core business objectives as they lead the healthcare provider’s growth and innovation strategy.

Improving Customer Retention and Creating Competitive Advantage

Many Chicagoland specialty care providers are facing competition from larger healthcare organizations with specialty practices.  Demographics have increased the size of the available market share pie, providing an opportunity to grow through expansion, as well as rethink the relationships with the hospitals, physicians, and caseworkers who refer patients to specialty healthcare providers.

An independent specialty healthcare provider recognized the opportunities to grow by improving the personal interactions between their client executives and the caseworkers and physicians they worked with every day.   The CIO made the case for using capabilities built into Microsoft Office 365 to give client executives more flexibility in communicating and collaborating.  Time is the most important commodity for these individuals, and the CIO reasoned that saving time and improving the interactive experience with the customer would be a winner for everyone.  Preliminary input from key customers indicated that, by making it easier for the customer to work with the healthcare provider, they could easily gain competitive advantage.

During this process, client executives surfaced additional needs expressed by their caseworker and physician customers. They were looking for access to data that would help to improve patient care and outcomes as they transitioned to the provider’s facility.  Thus, the CIO is presently working in partnership with BDO Digital, along with client executives and other leaders of the organization, to craft a data analytics strategy and approach.

Controlling Cost and Maintaining Efficiency During Growth

As the provider adds new facilities and staff, processes for working together need to evolve.  The provider’s workforce is very diverse in their receptiveness to change and adoption of technology.  People who are used to working face-to-face and walking down the hall for a conversation will now have to interact remotely.  In responding to these challenges, the CIO also recognized the need to be very deliberate with technology implementation to meet real needs without creating uncontrolled sprawl and unacceptable risk around sensitive data.  A series of use cases were defined, and a roadmap was created to prioritize their implementation as the provider executes on its expansion and growth plans. This roadmap includes a process for employee enablement and adoption of new technology capabilities, as well as measuring the impact these new capabilities are having on the original set of needs underpinning the use cases that were created.

Tools Used

The provider is taking advantage of Microsoft 365 capabilities to streamline and improve interactions with the individual caseworkers and physicians.  Tools for collaboration between employees will also become vital to productive operations between many departments as new facilities come online.  By leveraging the full potential of the Microsoft Office 365 suite, the healthcare provider took advantage of capabilities including Skype for Business, OneDrive, SharePoint, Yammer, and Exchange, with plans to add  Power BI, Teams, Flow, and Groups to the solution based on use case priority.

BDO Digital’s adoption framework was employed to address constantly evolving needs, create use cases and a roadmap, facilitate the high adoption of new capabilities, provide security, reduce the risk of technology sprawl, and take advantage of continuous innovation in Microsoft cloud services to the benefit of the provider and their customers.