Portal Solution Improves Health of Patients and Healthcare ...



Overview

Country or Region: United States

Industry: Healthcare

Customer Profile

With 2,800 employees, including over 300 clinicians and an additional 3,000 contracted clinicians, HealthCare Partners provides care to over 500,000 patients from 32 locations across the Los Angeles area.

Business Situation

To improve staff productivity and patient care, HealthCare Partners needed a faster and more accessible corporate information system.

Solution

HealthCare Partners deployed Microsoft® SharePoint® Products and Technologies to create portals and Web sites where staff and clinicians can quickly post and access information.

Benefits

■ More efficient, time-saving patient-care

■ Savings in clinician time and patient expense

■ More informed employees, clinicians

■ More efficient performance measurement

■ Increased IT productivity by 50 percent

| | |“This is a great opportunity, and it certainly saves us time and money. It makes the information more current and consistent.”

David Finkel, Manager of Systems Architecture, HealthCare Partners

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| | | |HealthCare Partners provides care to approximately 500,000 patients from 32 locations across the |

| | | |greater Los Angeles area. To improve productivity of its 2,800 employees and help enable more |

| | | |effective treatment of patients, HealthCare Partners needed a new corporate information system to |

| | | |provide more timely, up-to-date, and easily accessible information. The company deployed Microsoft® |

| | | |SharePoint® Products and Technologies to create portals and Web sites where clinicians and staff can |

| | | |quickly post and access healthcare information. Business leaders are using new data analysis |

| | | |capabilities to better analyze business performance and respond more quickly to changing healthcare |

| | | |plans and regulations. These improvements have resulted in more timely and appropriate care for |

| | | |patients, better informed clinicians, more efficient use of resources, and IT support cost savings. |

| | | | |

| | | |[pic] |

| | | | |

Situation

HealthCare Partners is a leading medical group in Southern California dedicated to the well-being and respectful, compassionate care of its over 500,000 patients. A provider of Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) and other services, HealthCare Partners Medical Group operates from 32 locations across the greater Los Angeles area, including 4 urgent care centers. Its 2,800 employees include over 300 clinicians, and the company retains an additional 3,000 contracted clinicians.

The “health” of HealthCare Partners as a business is directly related to the well-being of its patients. According to David Finkel, Manager of Systems Architecture at HealthCare Partners, “The healthier we keep our patients, the better off we’re going to be.” However, explosive growth and constant change of information needed to deliver care was beginning to have an impact on the company’s business operations. Several examples illustrate the need for fundamental improvements in the way HealthCare Partners managed its corporate information.

Care Protocols

When a patient is diagnosed with a condition requiring further medical attention, quickly determining the next step means the patient can receive more timely care. Standard care protocols (pre-approved treatment guidelines) are key to ensuring fast response. HealthCare Partners traditionally provided protocols by way of e-mail messages to the lead physicians at each location. Whenever a protocol was changed or a new one developed, lead physicians were responsible for disseminating this information to their staffs. As many of the protocols covered conditions that individual clinicians did not see in their normal practice, they had to read through a lot of irrelevant information, thus creating hours of additional work. When a patient did present a condition covered by a new care protocol, it was difficult for clinicians to be sure the protocol they were using was the most current. This could lead to extra referrals, additional staff time, increased expenses for unnecessary treatment, and a delay in providing appropriate care.

Prescription Medications

HealthCare Partners manages prescriptions under different healthcare plans. Each plan has its own formulary guide listing prescriptions available at lower cost or requiring lower co-payment. Frequently, two or more medications can be used with equal effectiveness to treat a patient’s condition. One medication might be on the formulary list of a particular patient’s plan, and require only a small co-payment. The other(s) might not, and, thus, would require a higher payment. This situation frequently resulted in phone calls from patients requesting a change in their prescriptions, which therefore required additional clinician time. Patients unable to pay the higher cost took additional risks by delaying or not filling the prescription.

To manage prescriptions, HealthCare Partners published a formulary guide that had to be printed, bundled, and sent out to each clinician. However, these guides covered only the most common prescriptions. If a patient required a less common prescription, clinicians had to review the patient’s individual plan to determine if the prescription was covered. And because the paper-based formulary guide was published at discrete times, it was difficult for clinicians to keep current with constantly changing healthcare plans.

New Information System Needed

To improve the “health” of both the organization and its patients, HealthCare Partners needed to provide faster, easier information access to its clinicians and staff. Prior solutions resulted in a variety of problems including:

■ Multiple, disparate sources of information.

■ Inefficient information search.

■ Quickly outdated paper documents.

■ Difficult-to-track e-mail notifications.

■ High level of IT involvement.

The Care Protocol and Formulary Guides were published by HealthCare Partners as paper documents and would quickly become outdated. E-mail notification of changes required each staff member to update his or her own documents, and made it difficult to enforce company-wide standard practices.

HealthCare Partners also wanted medical practitioners to directly manage technical content of intranet sites, without requiring IT staff assistance. This management ability would encourage increased contributions from experts across the organization and enable care providers to access the latest medical information available.

Finally, HealthCare Partners needed to more easily analyze corporate performance trends to help enable its leaders to make better healthcare and business decisions.

Solution

HealthCare Partners deployed Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003, part of Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server software, and Microsoft Windows® SharePoint Services to create its My HealthCare Partners (MYHCP) Portal. This main portal provides all employees with access to current events, calendars, training schedules, and other corporate information. The company is also developing departmental portals to help meet specific healthcare and business objectives.

The Employee and Clinician Services Portal

One of the most highly utilized portals is the Employee and Clinician Services (E&CS) Portal. The E&CS Portal was built to provide all employees an online location where they can quickly search other SharePoint sites to find information relevant to their work, including:

■ Benefits offerings.

■ All current position openings.

■ Education and development opportunities.

■ Performance Assessment Process and forms.

■ Weekly new hires.

■ Access to all E&CS forms.

■ Messages from management and senior staff.

Because the content of these SharePoint sites can be easily managed, E&CS staff can keep sites current without IT staff involvement. This is crucial in the rapidly changing and highly regulated healthcare industry. According to Jay Schwanz, Vice President, E&CS at HealthCare Partners, “Windows SharePoint Services provides the flexibility to add or remove information with ease, is easy to maneuver to locate what you are looking for, and enhances the level of service we can provide our internal customers.” Finkel adds, “This has been very successful, and feedback we have received regarding accessibility of information has been outstanding.”

In addition, the E&CS Portal is rolling out an Employee Self Service (ESS) site that will allow employees to access personalized information such as benefits, job performance, and training schedules.

The Medical Operations Portal

The Medical Operations Portal was created to help clinicians provide more effective patient care while reducing redundant work. Available on the HealthCare Partners intranet and through Virtual Private Network (VPN) access, this portal includes a number of specialized SharePoint sites, including:

■ A Formulary Guide: The Formulary Guide helps enable clinicians to quickly search thousands of medications across many healthcare plans to find the best and most affordable prescriptions for their patients.

■ Care Protocol: The Care Protocol site provides current care protocol information, and helps enable clinicians to accurately follow procedures and practices established by senior medical staff to provide the best, overall evidence-based care.

■ Medical Internet Sites: A list of external medical resource sites is managed and updated by senior medical staff.

■ Clinical Bulletins: A site where senior medical staff can post articles and information on “hot topics” in healthcare, including new drugs and treatments, drug recalls, and public health issues.

■ Continuing Medical Education (CME): HealthCare Partners is one of the few non-hospital groups with Category One Accreditation for CME. This site provides a full calendar of medical classes, lectures, and other educational opportunities for clinicians.

According to Dan Temianka, M.D., Medical Director, Quality Management, HealthCare Partners, "The MedOps [Medical Operations] Portal has proven to be invaluable for real-time communication of important clinical information to our entire staff.”

Helpful Features in Microsoft Office 2003 Simplify Adoption

HealthCare Partners elected to deploy Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 for its content creators. Many new integration features between Office 2003 programs and Windows SharePoint Services made it easy for content authors to shift their attention from learning the new system to developing new content and keeping sites current.

Benefits

More Efficient Care Protocol Saves Time and Money While Improving Patient Health

For HealthCare Partners, following standard care protocols is crucial to promoting patient care and ensuring business success. The Care Protocol site within the Medical Operations Portal has vastly improved delivery of standard procedures to the company’s providers, resulting in faster, more appropriate care for patients and time savings for healthcare professionals.

According to Finkel, “If [clinicians] follow the care protocol, then the patient gets referrals more quickly and gets procedures done more quickly. It is so important that they have access to primary care protocols.”

Medical Operations Portal also provides approved clinicians access to Hayes Online, which serves as a default arbiter to determine whether certain medical treatments are considered experimental or accepted as effective treatment. Having this information available online eliminates the time previously required for personal or telephone consultations or paper-based research before moving forward with treatment.

Online Formulary Guide Saves Clinician Time and Patient Expense

Paper-based formulary guides have been replaced by a frequently updated electronic version for every health plan they serve. Accessible through the Medical Operations Portal, the new formulary saves many hours clinicians previously needed to read through individual plans. Clinicians can now quickly search thousands of medications by condition, healthcare plan, drug name, and medication category in order to provide patients with a prescription that is both effective for their condition and most affordable for their plan. The result is time savings for the clinician and cost savings for both the patient and HealthCare Partners.

Employees and Clinicians Are More Informed

The healthcare industry is rapidly changing and highly regulated. The HealthCare Partners E&CS Portal provides employees with information they need to improve healing skills while maintaining compliance with licensing requirements and regulations. The portal also provides company news, job openings, and critical workplace safety information to help employees avoid exposure to hazardous conditions and situations. Previously, all such information would be disseminated by paper or e-mail, but the messages frequently went unnoticed in employees’ overcrowded inboxes. Now, with a fully searchable portal, employees can quickly find what they need online.

On the Medical Operations Portal, clinicians can also find links to medical information they need from external sites without having to search the entire Internet or read through sites that might not provide accurate information. Having this capability helps improve their knowledge base and respond more quickly to new healthcare situations.

Because SharePoint Portal Server 2003 simplifies content management and integrates so tightly with Office 2003, the Medical Director can easily manage content and keep sites current without IT involvement, thereby saving valuable time and resources. As sites are updated, those who need the information can be alerted automatically by using the Alerts features built into Windows SharePoint Services.

More Efficient Performance Measurement Empowers Business Decisions

Before deploying SharePoint Portal Server, the content of paper-based, monthly business performance reports was limited to a set number of metrics. Managers now have an entirely new way to determine business performance. Integrated with Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 Reporting Services, the Medical Operations Portal provides management with the ability to flexibly analyze many different performance measures. As a result, the company can respond more quickly to changing conditions.

Business metrics can be analyzed in a number of ways: by location, region, and performance variable. The data can also be analyzed over time to discover historical trends, alert decision makers when trends change, and track progress toward goals. According to Finkel, “This is a great opportunity and it certainly saves us time and money. It makes the information more current and consistent.”

IT Productivity Increased and Moving Forward

Finkel describes the positive impact SharePoint Products and Technologies has had on the company’s IT operations: “We don’t manage content anymore. We manage the infrastructure and the tools. We can enable our users to actually update content directly so we can move on to develop new sites and the new portal environment.” Operational efficiencies derived from SharePoint Portal Server 2003 have helped enable HealthCare Partners to reduce IT staff required for security and application access by 50 percent. Finkel explains, “We don’t have to manage access lists because it is all tied into Active Directory®, [a central component of Microsoft Windows Server™, operating system], so we don’t have to do ongoing maintenance.”

Looking ahead, HealthCare Partners is working diligently to expand its use of SharePoint Products and Technologies to include an extranet Physician Portal to manage dynamic patient information not only for internal clinicians, but also for over 3,000 contracted clinicians. By freeing IT staff from such areas as content management and application access, SharePoint Products and Technologies are empowering IT staff to pursue these new opportunities. Finkel puts it this way, “SharePoint Portal Server has definitely put us in a go-forward position.”

Microsoft Office System

Microsoft Office is the business world's chosen environment for information work that provides the software, servers, and services that help you succeed by transforming information into impact.

For more information about Microsoft Office System, go to:

‌office/

Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies

Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 enables enterprises to deploy an intelligent portal that seamlessly connects users, teams, and knowledge so that people can leverage relevant information across business processes to help them work more efficiently. Windows SharePoint Services allows teams to create Web sites for information sharing and document collaboration, benefits that help increase individual and team productivity.

For more information about Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies, go to:

sharepoint

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| |Software and Services

■ Windows Server System

− Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003

− Microsoft SQL Server 2000

■ Microsoft Office System

− Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 |Technologies

− Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services

− Active Directory | |

“Windows SharePoint Services provides the flexibility to add or remove information with ease, is easy to maneuver to locate what you are looking for, and enhances the level of service we can provide our internal customers.”

Jay Schwanz, VP, E&CS, HealthCare Partners

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© 2005 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Microsoft, Active Directory, the Office logo, SharePoint, Windows, Windows Server, and Windows Server System are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

Document published March 2005 | | |

For More Information

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“We don’t manage content anymore. We manage the infrastructure and the tools. We can enable our users to actually update content directly so we can move on to develop new sites and the new portal environment.”

David Finkel, Manager of Systems Architecture, HealthCare Partners

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"The MedOps [Medical Operations] Portal has proven to be invaluable for real-time communication of important clinical information to our entire staff.

Dan Temianka, MD, Medical Director, Quality

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